In 1920, word spread across South Texas that Japanese businessmen and farmers in California were setting their sights on Texas for “colonization.” The rumor circulated in a San Benito newspaper that stoked the growing anti-Japanese sentiment across the state. While California was contemplating its own law barring aliens from landownership, historian Brent M.S. Campney notes in the Journal of Southern History that xenophobic fears in Texas were growing.
What was once “curiosity” grew to hostility. By 1921, Texas lawmakers were arguing that Japanese immigrants, legally unable to become citizens, could never assimilate. They posed, as one legionnaire told the lawmakers in support of a landownership ban, a security threat “in event of a war with Japan.” Legion men at the time searched for evidence that Japanese immigrants were behind “a well developed plot that assumed alarming international proportions.”
These scenes from Texas history are just a few from a long national past of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant policy and action that was in the spotlight in protests last month in response to a proposed Texas law that would restrict not only businesses and state entities from China from purchasing land in Texas, but individual citizens from China, too.
There is already a law, thanks to Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) who co-authored it in the last session, that prevents businesses from China as well as Iran, North Korea, Russia, or any other country the governor deems as a threat, from doing business that gives them access to critical infrastructure, including water treatment, communications, electricity, waste treatment and more.
The new bill, SB 147, goes a step beyond. And a step too far, in our estimation, targeting individual immigrants and their families in a sweeping ban that sacrifices our values regarding equity, opportunity and economic growth to address a concern that’s still ill-defined.
Kolkhorst is a respected veteran lawmaker who isn’t known for instigating racist, mean-spirited legislation or gratuitously paratrooping into culture war battles, but she is a Republican team player who has shown herself willing to carry the water of more unsavory fringes of the GOP, as when she sponsored Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s “bathroom bill” targeting transgender Texans.
It seems likely that legitimate national security concerns are motivating Kolkhorst but the current proposal goes too far and, instead, fuels partisan fighting. The bill has strong support from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who tweeted about his eagerness to sign it into law. Just as quickly, it was met with quick condemnation from other lawmakers, including Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston).
Houston Chronicle
