Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach seeks sweeping limits on foreign ownership of land

When Panasonic moved to build a sprawling battery factory in Johnson County, it confirmed with federal officials the site was environmentally safe. And the company convinced Kansas to provide hundreds of millions in financial incentives.

But Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is proposing new legislation that would have also required the Japanese company to convince a council of state leaders that its foreign status didn’t post a security risk to Kansas or the United States.

Kobach wants state lawmakers to approve a bill banning by default all foreign ownership or leasing of three acres or more of Kansas land. Foreign nationals, or companies owned or controlled by foreign nationals, could ask a newly established “state land council” for an exemption.

Efforts to restrict foreign land ownership have skyrocketed across the country in recent years alongside rising tensions between the United States and China. Kobach’s bill marks one of the most sweeping recent efforts to limit foreign ownership of land.

The measure targets foreign nationals from any country in the world and does not stop at agricultural land but extends to all commercial and residential purchases by foreign entities as well. It makes no distinction between friendly and adversarial nations, and includes no automatic exemption for non-citizen legal residents who have not obtained their green card.

“When a county seeks to put its economic growth and increased tax revenues over the security interests of the state of Kansas that’s concerning and this would allow a state body to screen any county decisions like that,” Kobach said at a press conference, referencing Johnson County’s decision to offer tax incentives to Cnano, a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese company building a $95 million facility in the state.

The policy faces steep opposition from immigrants, business groups and agriculture groups that argue the policy is overly broad and risks infringing on property rights while blocking foreign nationals or immigrants with no connection to an adversarial government from buying acreage or bringing their business to Kansas. Kansas House Republican leaders have already signaled they plan to take the policy in a different direction.

The Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee held a hearing on the proposal on Wednesday.

“The devil’s in the details but it would detract from Kansas as an attractive place to invest,” said Donna Ginther, director of the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.

In an interview with The Star, Ginther argued the proposal would create a chilling effect on foreign companies considering offices or factories in Kansas. If the restrictions had been in place two years ago when Panasonic chose to build its $4 billion factory, Kansas may have never been considered, she said.

Kobach called that argument “ridiculous” and noted that the company already had to jump through several hoops. Analysis by the Kansas Department of Revenue, Kobach said, indicated that only about 100 transactions each year would need approval by the council.

“The vast majority of these transactions wouldn’t be affected,” Kobach said of economic development deals.

The council would include the governor, state attorney general, state secretary of state, adjutant general and the director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Each member would be allowed to sit on the council themselves or appoint someone in their place.

Chambers of commerce from across the state warned the law would reduce the state’s competitiveness in recruiting businesses by creating new burdens and delays for companies.

Eric Stafford, a lobbyist for the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, noted that several major Kansas companies including Garmin and Airbus are owned by foreign entities. While these companies would not be forced to divest any expansions would require approval.

“This legislation would serve to restrict so much of the international trade Kansas has been working to grow with countries around the globe, something that Kansans and Kansas businesses rely on,” Katrina Abraham, a lobbyist for the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, said in written testimony.

The ACLU of Kansas suggested the law may be unconstitutional and Alejandro Rangel-Lopez, campaign manager for New Frontiers, a southwest Kansas civic engagement group, said the proposed state council would create a new burden and potential discrimination for immigrant families seeking to buy property.

“These are folks who want nothing more than to provide a home for their children,” said Rangel-Lopez, the son of immigrants.

‘We can balance the risk’

Many of the bill’s opponents said they didn’t object to the end goal of safeguarding national security but urged lawmakers to achieve it in the narrowest way possible, and to focus only on governments of designated foreign adversaries.

But Sen. Mike Thompson, a Shawnee Republican who chairs the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee, said he was happy with the bill as crafted.

“When you start trying to identify individual countries, as the attorney general pointed out, that’s going to change. And so we would be chasing that situation constantly,” Thompson said.

Two dozen states have implemented some form of restriction on foreign land ownership, with 15 passing limits last year alone. Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, said Kobach’s bill is the only submitted proposal he’s aware of that would create a council to determine whether to allow a purchase.

Roger McEowan, an agriculture law expert at Washburn University, said the threat of Chinese ownership of U.S. agricultural land is very real. Foreign actors have sought to purchase land near military bases to spy on and steal technology, he said.

“We are a major food producer to the world so it’s important to make sure that the ownership of that remains in people that are loyal to our cause,” McEowan said. “It’s a concern of food security and now national security around that.”

Currently, China owns a very small percentage of farmland in Kansas, though data on foreign land ownership nationwide is often underreported.

David Ortega, a Michigan State professor whose research has focused on the agriculture and food sector in China, said he has not seen evidence that the country is actually working to buy up American farmland.

“Their investments really bypass North America,” Ortega said, noting that efforts to ban purchases could cause unintended consequences in foreign relations and economic growth.

McEowan recommended a targeted approach that is careful to avoid punishing foreign nationals and companies who have no connection to a foreign government, which appears to be the direction leadership in the House wants to take the policy

House Majority Leader Chris Croft, an Overland Park Republican, said foreign land ownership was a concern across Kansas’ economy, not just in the agriculture sector. He said the issue needed a comprehensive look but indicated he wants to tailor the House bill to specific countries.

“We all agree that bad actors exist, and we need to do everything we can to keep them from being able to engage in state-sponsored theft of intellectual property or gathering intelligence on our critical infrastructure,” Croft said in a statement.

“I believe that we can balance the risk of bad actors with the benefits that can come from good-faith investment by more narrowly tailoring our bill to capture specifically adversarial nations.”