Real Property Quotes
In developed nations land tends to be fungible—there is a fair market value to land and there is little emotional attachment to a particular piece of land. However for aborigines and citizens of many lesser developed countries, land is not fungible. Ancestor burial, tradition, family identity, dignity requires a particular plot of land—not just acreage. So taking of land—even with monetary compensation—is often liable to induce violent protest.
This was an effort to keep Asian immigrants—who were ineligible for citizenship under the racist Federal laws though the 1930s from competing with American farmers. Many of the Western states also had laws or Constitutions prohibiting Asians to not only own land but also forbidding them from even having long tern leases on land. The Japanese in California were so successful that in the 1920s that state passed a version of Asian land ownership prohibition. The Supreme Court at the time actually ruled that this kind of discrimination was legal. A French alien could own land but not a Japanese. The loophole however was that many Japanese short term tenant farmers who had saved enough money to buy land, had children who were born in the United State and hence where citizens. The land was purchased by the citizen children. California however went so far as to make it illegal for a Japanese person to be a guardian of his minor children if the children were born in the United States, but that law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
