Political Quotes

“I wanted to be able to come back to the floor to talk about the SOIL Act. The SOIL Act is a bill that I introduced last year that deals with Chinese ownership of land in the United States. Since I have introduced this bill, several of my colleagues here in this room have also introduced other bills that are similar to it. Good. That means people are paying attention to this and the conversation is starting. I am all for as many ideas as we can get out here on how to be able to solve this because the most basic principle that we have right now is, if we miss an obvious trend that is happening here, it is to our economic peril. This chart has just a very simple number on it. In 2020, Chinese entities owned almost 200,000 acres of land in the United States. One year later, they are at almost 400,000 acres in the United States--in 1 year. This is from 2020 to 2021. This trend is happening all over the country, and we are certainly seeing it in my State of Oklahoma. When I travel around my State, I hear people talk about the border; I hear people talk about the economy; and I often will hear people say: Hey, there is a lot of foreign ownership going into land right now in Oklahoma, and it is dramatically affecting the price of real estate, the price of agricultural land but also what is happening on that land. Now, my State may be a little bit different than some others or it may be that the same thing is happening in your State.…”