The California Alien Land Act of 1913 was a law enacted to prohibit "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owing land or property in California. This law was particularly aimed at Asian immigrants--mostly Japanese and Chinese farmers in the state--and is an example of how racial animosity manifested itself in private land ownership as an important aspect of U.S. law.
Background
With "race" defined in the 19th and 20th centuries strictly along the white/nonwhite line, Asians fell in the latter category. As the United States expanded westward across the North American continent, that line was also applied to land. When Oregon became the 33rd state of the Union in 1859, its Constitution stated that "Chinamen" could ever own land there, noting that there was a substantial Chinese population earning their living in the area as laborers. By 1882, their subordinate racial status was further confirmed with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which prohibited Chinese immigration for a 10-year period.
Passage
Although such anti-Chinese racism was transferred to the Japanese--who had started to enter the U.S. in significant numbers in the 1890s--they were able to economically prosper by using every single member of their families to save labor costs, much to the envy of some of their white counterparts. In 1913, an "Alien Land Law" was overwhelmingly passed by the California legislature. The law relied on the federal naturalized citizenship requirement of the age--that one had to be a "free white person"--to bar Asian laborers from owning land.
The 1920 Amendment
The California Alien Land Act did not halt the success of the Japanese; in fact, the number of Japanese landowners in the state increased after the law's passage. They were able to do so by assigning titles in the name of U.S. citizen children under their guardianship, or forming shareholder-run agricultural corporations. The California legislature thus passed an initiative in 1920 banning these practices employed to circumvent the Alien Land Act.
Followers
In the decade afterward, other western states followed California's lead. Arizona passed its own alien land law in 1917. After California's 1920 amendment to the Alien Land Act, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana and Washington passed similar laws. Arkansas, Wyoming and Utah joined them during World War II. In a string of cases between 1923 and 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of California's law.
Repeal
It was not until after World War II that the Supreme Court overturned the California Alien Land Act, as well as the laws it had spawned. Oyama v. California (1948) was the first successful case to challenge the alien laws, and was successful when the Supreme Court used the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to overturn a provision in the 1920 amendment that forbade "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from being a guardian to a minor U.S.-born child. This was one of the ways that Japanese farmers had used to circumvent the 1913 law. The case was cited in Sei Fujii v. California (1952), which finally overturned the 1920 amendment, then the California Alien Land Act itself in 1956. In 2001, Wyoming's alien land law was the last one to fall.
Tags: California Alien, California Alien Land, Alien Land, 1920 amendment, Alien Land, Supreme Court