Kobach’s scare tactics about Chinese Kansas land ownership sounds like an old refrain | Opinion
Take a guess: How much Kansas land does China own?
It’s probably not a lot — you probably would have heard something about it if so — but it can’t be nothing, right? American right-wingers have spent much of the last year raising alarms about Chinese communists buying up farmland across the country and passing laws against foreign ownership, so there’s got to be a there there. Right?
So: Is it 10,000 acres? Or maybe just 1,000 acres. Or even just 100?
A pair of Kansas State University economists made that assessment back in April, based on the results of a Freedom of Information Act inquiry with the federal government. That half-acre is located in Riley County, purchased in 2018.
Doesn’t sound very scary, does it?
Nonetheless, it probably won’t surprise you that Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach — a man who never met a xenophobic McCarthyite panic he didn’t wholeheartedly embrace — is now pushing for a state law to greatly restrict foreign ownership of Kansas land. And China is the reason he’s offering.
“U.S. citizens and companies must control our own land,” Kobach wrote Wednesday on social media, echoing comments he made the previous day before a legislative committee. “It’s a hedge against the threat China and other foreign bad actors pose to our supply chain and our food security.”
That does sound scary! Especially if you don’t know that China, again, owns just a half-acre of Kansas land. Or that — according to a recent NBC News report — Chinese buyers have purchased just 1,400 acres of land across the entire United State over the last year and a half.
“In fact,” NBC reported, “the total amount of U.S. agricultural land owned by Chinese interests is less than three-hundredths of 1%.”
Maybe there isn’t a there there, after all.
Kobach’s own numbers, according to his legislative testimony, suggest that China controls about 383,000 acres of American farmland. That number might be an undercount, he said, and at any rate is growing too quickly. “There is no question that China’s acquisition of agricultural land throughout the Midwest is increasing faster than that of other countries,” his spokesperson told me by email.
But we’ve been down this road before with Kobach, haven’t we? The attorney general just loves to wage war against imaginary foreign enemies.
Back in 2012, when he was Kansas secretary of state, he indulged the false notion that then-President Barack Obama wasn’t really an American citizen and suggested the state needed more information before allowing the president a spot on that year’s election ballot. “I don’t think it’s a frivolous objection,” he said at the time.
It was, in fact, a frivolous objection.
More famously, Kobach was behind a state law requiring voters to prove their citizenship — this despite the fact that there wasn’t much proof of foreign residents rushing to vote in Kansas. During the ensuing lawsuit in 2018, Kobach said just 129 noncitizens had registered or attempted to register to vote in Kansas since 2000. The law, meanwhile, ended up blocking an estimated 35,000 Kansans from voting.
“The 129 is just the tip of the iceberg … we know the iceberg is much larger,” he said.
A judge disagreed. Kobach lost the lawsuit — and, embarrassingly, was ordered to take remedial law classes.
And of course, Kobach helped lead Donald Trump’s commission that set out to prove foreign voters gave Hillary Clinton the popular vote lead in the 2016 election. (Trump won the presidency via the Electoral College but wasn’t content to leave it at that.) The commission came up empty-handed.
You’ve probably heard these examples a few times by now. I’ve certainly written about them often enough. And yet they’re worth reviving when Kobach, once again, tries to convince Kansans that foreign threats — to our voting process, to our democracy, to our very land — walk among us.
Put it this way: Kobach has a real “boy who cried wolf” problem on this kind of stuff. Why should we believe him this time?