Alien Land Laws

The Alien Land Laws refer to state legislation passed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries barring persons ineligible for U.S. citizenship from owning or leasing land. Initially, in some western states, Alien Land Laws were enacted to ensure [Page 178]that resident aliens (who were white) could hold land in the same manner as citizens as a means of encouraging westward settlement. Larry A. McFarlane, in a study of similar legislation in Kansas enacted in 1891 and repealed in 1901, makes the case that “populist agrarians” wanted to restrict land speculation by British mortgage companies and absentee landlordism.

Anti-Asian Alien Land Laws, on the other hand, arose from the intensification of competition for natural resources between Americans, who believed that they had so-called natural rights to the land, but not “inassimilable Orientals.” Similarly, workers’ fear that “Americans” were losing jobs to Asian labor significantly added to anti-Asian sentiment. On a more profound level, the battle over landownership was intimately tied to the enduring question of American identity. Alien Land Laws implicitly tied national identity to racial identity and both of those to the notion of an essential and natural connection to the land.

To understand the scope of this struggle over land, the evolution of the Alien Land Laws must be connected to a larger history of Supreme Court decisions between 1891 and 1924 and to federal legislation going back to 1790. The Alien Land Laws, in other words, used several lines of attack. The 1790 Naturalization Act, for instance, stipulated that only “whites” could apply for citizenship. The Naturalization Act of 1870 expanded citizenship to include former enslaved people and those of African descent, but expressly stated that Asians were “aliens ineligible for citizenship.”

Anti-Asian Alien Land Laws also used other federal legislation, such as the Page Act of 1875, the Chinese Exclusion Acts passed between 1882 and 1904, the Gentlemen's Agreement between Japan and the United States of 1907 to 1908, and the establishment of an Asiatic Barred Zone in 1917. The 1875 Page Law prohibited the entry of “undesirable” Asians, that is, contract laborers, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and persons who were deemed convicts in their country of origin.

Asian Exclusion Laws

Kiichiro Kosai and his son, Frank Kosai, were the original owners of this dairy farm in Auburn, Washington. As Japanese immigrants, they fought a legal battle for ownership of the farm after their 1919 purchase of the land was challenged under Washington State's Anti-Alien Land Law of 1921. The photo shows the farm's creamery (left), milk barn, and main barn in the late 20th century.

In 1859, Oregon passed a law that specifically barred Chinese immigrants from owning land. Then in 1879, California gave the right of land ownership to white Americans or African Americans only. This law eventually became the 1913 Webb-Heney Alien Land Act, which used the [Page 179]wording that persons ineligible for citizenship could not own or lease land. The 1913 Webb-Heney Act was signed into law by then-governor Hiram Johnson, and expanded in 1920 and, again, in 1923. Eventually, California's example spurred other states to pass similar legislation, namely, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

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