It always helps to have nefarious targets — imaginary or not — to help spur action.
China and Mexico, always convenient bogeymen for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, are in the spotlight once again. This time, says Kobach, they’re after our land.
“It’s open season,” Kobach warned Kansas legislators this week. “Mexican drug cartels have purchased a huge amount of land in Texas, Oklahoma and California.”
It’s only a matter of time, he intimated, until they make their way north.
Circle the wagons.
Kobach’s goal is to ban the purchase of land greater than 3 acres by foreigners on the premise that they are up to no good.
When pressed for proof, he came up short. Which did not stop him from falling back on the xenophobic tropes that Mexicans are drug lords and China’s out to control our food supply.
Kobach has proposed a five-member panel, including himself and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which reports to Kobach, be installed to review any requests for exemptions to the ban. This way, only the “good” people can invest in Kansas, said Sen. Mike Thompson, who is pushing Kobach’s ban to become law.
The anti-vaccine, climate-change denying senator is chair of the Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs, where the bill is scheduled to be heard.
This is all smoke and mirrors.
Of the almost 50 million acres of agricultural land in Kansas, only 67,716 acres have any foreign involvement not related to energy production. That’s 0.14 percent of all privately held land.
The majority of Kansas farmland with foreign interest — an estimated 1 million-plus acres, or 2.4 percent — is that leased by wind and solar energy companies.
According to an August 2023 report by the K-State Department of Agricultural Economics, if a U.S. company has over 10% foreign investment in the company stock, it is required to report in the same way a completely foreign-owned company would.
And even then, that 1 million acres is misleading.
According to the KSU research, though a wind farm may lease so many acres, its actual footprint is limited to the physical structures and access roads, all the while allowing the landowners to continue growing crops or grazing livestock on the leased parcel. Wind energy companies currently have leases in 41 out of the 105 counties in Kansas.
