#254 Citizenship Question; Lawsuit vs Florida SB 264; AA State Legislators; WIRED Report; +

In This Issue #254

·       House Vote on "The Equal Representation Act"

·       Florida's Land Law Impacting Homebuyers and Industry Prompts Another Lawsuit

·       Trailblazing Asian American State Legislators

·       "Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act" and WIRED Report

·       News and Activities for the Communities

House Vote on "The Equal Representation Act"

During the APA Justice monthly meeting on May 6, 2024, Nisha Ramachandran, Executive Director of Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC), alerted the attendees that a vote on H.R. 7109, the Equal Representation Act, in the House of Representatives was coming up. On May 8, 2024, Chairs of the Tri-Caucus, including CAPAC, Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), recommended their Members vote against this legislation in a joint statement.  H.R. 7109 passed the House by a vote of 206-202 along the party line. According to NPR, a growing number of Republican lawmakers are making a renewed push for an unprecedented change to the country's election maps.  Their proposals call for excluding millions of non-U.S. citizens from the census results that determine each state's share of House seats and Electoral College votes.  In the current Congress, GOP lawmakers have filed at least a dozen measures related to using the next once-a-decade head count to tally how many noncitizens are living in the country, and then subtracting some or all of those U.S. residents from what are known as the congressional apportionment counts.Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, referenced the Supreme Court's unanimous 2016 decision in the redistricting case known as Evenwel v. Abbott, which said that the 14th Amendment "calls for the apportionment of congressional districts based on total population" - the "whole number of persons in each state."

Since the country's first population tally in 1790 — when one of the first lines of the Constitution required that an enslaved person be counted as "three fifths" of a free person and "Indians not taxed" not to be counted at all — both citizens and noncitizens living in the United States have been included in the apportionment counts, which the federal government has used to determine the size of each state's congressional delegation and slate of presidential electors.After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment called for the count to include the "whole number of persons in each state." (It took decades before the Census Bureau stopped omitting some American Indians from that tally.)According to The Hill, the government and nonprofits have dedicated years to education efforts encouraging noncitizens to respond to the Census, noting participation is never a basis for immigration enforcement.“A citizen’s only census, as this legislation intends, is reckless, cynical, and frankly, illegal,” Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) said on the House floor. “It is not the Census Bureau’s job to keep track of immigration status.”In a statement of administration policy, the Biden administration said it “strongly opposes” the measure “which would preclude the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau from performing its constitutionally mandated responsibility to count the number of persons in the United States in the decennial census.”The Supreme Court ruled against a last-minute effort by the Trump administration to add the citizenship question to the 2020 Census.

Media reports:2024/05/08 NPR: Republicans in Congress are trying to reshape election maps by excluding noncitizens report2024/05/08 The Hill: House GOP passes bill to add citizenship question to census2024/05/08 Government Executive: The House has voted to bring back a citizenship question to the census2024/05/08 AP News: Republicans renew push to exclude noncitizens from the census that helps determine political power2024/05/08 Forbes: 'An Insult': Jamie Raskin Trashes GOP Effort To Include Citizenship Question On The Census (7:36)

Florida's Land Law Impacting Homebuyers and Industry Prompts Another Lawsuit

The New York Times reported on May 6, 2024, that Florida's recent legislation, SB 264, restricting home purchases by Chinese citizens is increasingly affecting both buyers and the state's real estate sector.According to the report, more than three dozen states have enacted or are considering similar laws restricting land purchases by Chinese citizens and companies, arguing that such transactions are a growing threat to national security and that the federal government has failed to stop Chinese Communist Party influence in America. Florida’s law, which went into effect in July, is among the furthest reaching. In addition to barring Chinese entities from buying agricultural land, it effectively prohibits most Chinese individuals without a green card from purchasing residential property.The New York Times conducted more than a dozen interviews. Chinese residents in Florida voiced frustrations about being cut off from the ultimate American dream. Other residents of Chinese descent said they faced discrimination as they tried to buy a home. Some said they lived in fear over whether they may have inadvertently violated the law. The report further pointed out that the law has also had an apparent chilling effect on the real estate industry, an important part of the state’s economy. Developers often rely on Chinese investors to help build projects in Florida, and the law appears to have barred such financing, prompting pushback from a prominent real estate lobbying group.

Chinese interests own less than 1 percent of foreign-held agricultural land in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. National security experts said that the specific threat posed by Chinese people owning homes has not been clearly articulated. Civil rights groups and residents have challenged the Florida law in federal court on grounds that it violates the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act, and that it undercuts the federal government powers on foreign affairs. “There’s no evidence that Chinese homeownership poses harm to national security,” said Ashley Gorski, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups that brought the suit.In addition, according to a press release on May 6, 2024, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the Asian Real Estate Association of America (AREAA), Housing Opportunities Project for Excellence, Inc., and the Fair Housing Center of the Greater Palm Beach filed a fair housing discrimination suit in federal court in Miami challenging Florida’s SB 264.“Xenophobia has no place in our country—and let there be no mistake, that’s precisely what SB 264 is,” said Noah Baron, Assistant Director of Litigation at Advancing Justice - AAJC. “This legislation echoes last century’s ‘alien land laws,’ which also restricted the property rights of Asian Americans on the basis of stereotypes and prejudice. The United States must not continue down this dangerous road; we know where it leads because we have traveled it before: during World War II when unfounded suspicions of Japanese Americans led to the forced imprisonment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans by the U.S. government and going as far back as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.”

The lawsuit filed by Relman Colfax, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, and Courtney Cunningham asserts that SB 264 violates the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits acts that are motivated by a person’s national origin or have a disproportionate harmful effect on people from specific countries. As described in the complaint, SB 264 is based on stereotyped and xenophobic generalizations, and is transparently motivated by discrimination against people from the seven targeted countries.Read the New York Times full report: https://nyti.ms/4bldrmi.  Read the NFHA press release: https://bit.ly/3UQqGpB.  Read the Advancing Justice | AAJC press release: https://bit.ly/3QD0o7Y.Lawsuits against Florida SB 264:

·       SHEN v. SIMPSON (4:23-cv-00208), filed on March 22, 2023

·       National Fair Housing Alliance, Inc. v. Secretary of Commerce (1:24-cv-21749), filed on May 6, 2024

Juan Zhang, editor at US-China Perception Monitor, contributed to this report.

Trailblazing Asian American State Legislators

According to the 19th News, When Dr. Michelle Au mounted her first run for office in Georgia, a political operative said she shouldn’t “waste too much of her time” reaching out to Asian American voters. “Asian people don’t vote,” she was told.   Au — elected as a state senator in 2020 and then, after new district lines were drawn, as state representative in 2022 — knows that this is not only inaccurate, but a dangerous miscalculation for anyone who wants to win races in Georgia.  There are now more than 328,000 eligible AAPI voters in the state, making up just over 4 percent of the electorate. In Fulton County, where Au’s district is, AAPI voters constitute 10.5 percent of the eligible voter share. Dr. Michelle Au chairs the Georgia legislature’s first AAPI caucus, which is the largest state AAPI legislative caucus in the continental United States.  Read the 19th News report: https://bit.ly/4buqUbvAccording to KGW8-TV, Mae Yih broke barriers to become the first Chinese-born woman in the United States elected to a state legislative chamber.  She graduated from Barnard College in New York and was married in 1953.  With her husband's job, Mae would soon find herself moving to Albany, Oregon. It was a place neither of them had ever heard of.  "We had to look it up on map," said Yih. She became active on the school boards where her sons went to school and admits she was controversial.  She would get noticed and soon get an invitation from the Democratic Party to run for office.  "I was able to defeat a 14-year incumbent to be elected to the legislature. That's how I got started."  She served 6 years in the Oregon House of Representatives (1977–1983) and 20 years in the Oregon Senate (1983–2003). She believes it's important for Asian Americans to keep breaking barriers, especially in politics. "We need more elected Asian Americans in government to uphold equal opportunity and equal justice for all," Yih said.  At 95 years old, Mae Yih enjoys staying active.  Read the KGW8-TV report and watch the video: https://bit.ly/4bpLgT2 (3:57).

On May 6, 2024, Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued a proclamation marking May as Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month in Michigan.  “Michigan is a beacon of opportunity where people from all over the world came to for economic opportunity and success,” said Governor Whitmer. “In Michigan, we not only value and respect our differences, but we embrace them."  Featured in the Proclamation were state Senator Sam Singh (D-East Lansing), state Senator Stephanie Chang (D-Detroit), state Representative Ranjeev Puri (D-Canton), and state Representative Mai Xiong (D-Warren).  Read Governor Whitmer's press statement: https://bit.ly/4bry00n

"Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act" and WIRED Report

During the APA Justice monthly meeting on May 6, 2024, Joanna YangQing Derman, Director, Anti-Profiling, Civil Rights & National Security Program, Advancing Justice | AAJC, reported that the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act was signed into law, reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  It did not include two of the priorities:

1.     Requiring the government to obtain a warrant to search through Americans sensitive communications and

2.     Closing the data broker loophole.

It was not the pursued policy outcome.  However, Joanna highlighted that intervention by many AAPI groups has achieved results and paves the way for the longer term, including very strong House and Senate champions on the issue and a clean reauthorization that was not included in a must-pass vehicle.  Reauthorization will come up again in two years.According to a report by WIRED on May 8, 2024, a top FBI official is encouraging employees to continue to investigate Americans using a warrantless foreign surveillance program known as Section 702 in an effort to justify the bureau’s spy powers. Obtained by WIRED, an April 20 email authored by FBI deputy director Paul Abbate to employees states: “To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements.” Added Abbate: “I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use US person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law.”

“The deputy director's email seems to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but as a default,” says US representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California. “This directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”The limits of the 702 program remain murky, even to congressional members insisting that it should not be curbed further. The Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Mark Warner, acknowledged to reporters this week that language in Section 702 needs to be “fixed,” even though he voted last month to make the current language law.FISA experts had warned for months that new language introduced by the House Intelligence Committee is far too vague in the way it describes the categories of businesses the US government can compel, fearing that the government would obtain the power to force anyone with access to a target’s online communications into snooping on the NSA’s behalf—IT workers and data center staff among them.A trade group representing Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, among some of the world's other largest technology companies, concurred last month, arguing that the new version of the surveillance program threatens to “dramatically expand the scope of entities and individuals” subject to Section 702 orders.“We are working on it,” Warner told The Record on Monday. “I am absolutely committed to getting that fixed,” he said, suggesting the best time to do so would be “in the next intelligence bill.”Read the WIRED report: https://bit.ly/4dwJDoE

News and Activities for the Communities

1.  APA Justice Community Calendar

Upcoming Events:2024/05/13-14 2024 APAICS Legislative Leadership Summit2024/05/14 2024 APAICS: 30th Annual Awards Gala2024/05/14 Serica Initiative: 7th Annual Women's Gala Dinner2024/05/14 National Historic Landmark Committee Meeting 2024/05/22 Heritage, Culture, and Community: The Future of America's Chinatowns2024/06/02 Rep. Gene Wu's Town Hall MeetingVisit https://bit.ly/45KGyga for event details. 

2.  National Historic Landmark Committee Meeting

The National Historic Landmark (NHL) Committee under the National Park Service will meet virtually May 14-15, 2024. The Committee will consider eleven new nominations for National Historic Landmark designation, three updated nominations, and one withdrawal.  One of the new nominations is Summit Camp, Tahoe National Forest, CAThe Committee will recommend NHL actions to refer to the National Park System Advisory Board (NPSAB) for consideration. At its subsequent meeting, the NPSAB will vote on whether to recommend that the Secretary of the Interior proceed with these proposed designations, updated documentation, and withdrawal of designation.Read the meeting agenda and register to attend at https://bit.ly/3WB4bGq

3. Save the Date: 2024 National AAPI Leadership Summit & Presidential Town Hall

APIAVote will hold its 2024 National AAPI Leadership Summit on July 11-12, 2024 at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown, where partners, experts, and communities nationwide converge to explore key issues and mobilize the AAPI community for the 2024 elections.  The Summit will culminate with the Presidential Town Hall on July 13, 2024, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. This event connects presidential candidates with AAPI community leaders and organizers to discuss crucial issues.  For more information, contact admin@apiavote.org