1952 - Sei Fuiji v. California - A Journey to Land Ownership

Ga Rab Yoon

Law is perhaps the most powerful form of popular culture that impacts us in our everyday lives. Most of the times, laws are made based on the collective ideas or norms of the society. However, the sad truth is that these laws are not always the most ethical, or correct laws. It shows that majority is not always right. In fact, it clearly shows how mass thinking can be a cancerous phenomenon in our society. Back in the days, white supremacy was the norm, as the whites were the majority and others were minorities. Laws were made based on these majority racist ideas that one group of race is superior than the other. Asians were also a victim of this idea, and one type of these racist laws that caused hardships to Asian immigrants were Alien Land Laws.

Until in the 1950s, In California, as well as in many other states, immigrants of Asian ancestry could not own land and property. It was because of Alien Land Laws. The first law of the kind was the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from ownership of property or lands. Asian Americans were of course, ineligible aliens, and every Asian non-citizens were affected by this law. It was difficult, if not impossible, to be eligible to naturalize and become a citizen, because racial prejudice was common at the time. Usually, it was free white people, who were really eligible for naturalization. These types of laws didn’t stop in California—other states soon adopted similar laws to their states soon after. Of course, there were many tries to overturn this decision, such as Terrace v. Thompson (1923), Porterfield v. Webb (1923), Webb v. O’Brien (1923), Frick v. Webb (1923), and Cockrill v. California (1925). However, all these tries failed.

Overturning the Alien Land laws were not so easy, because of the deeply rooted prejudice, which looked at Asians as “orientals.” Asian Americans were the yellow peril. More and more of them kept coming to United States, and they were now trying to take away “our” land from us. We had to stop them. What do we do? We make racist laws and enforce it very hard. With the already-negative images of Asian Americans getting worse with World War II and Anti-Japanese sentiment, It seemed like there was no room for the decision to be overturned, but…

Finally, in 1952, in a Supreme Court case of Fujii v. State of California, the Alien Land Law that existed in California was overturned. Sei Fujii was an ineligible Japanese alien, in the state of California. He basically argued that because of the United Nations charter protects “fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race” to the citizens of member countries, he, as a citizen of Japan, had the right to own land, which was a fundamental freedom in his mind. The issue was upon the power of local laws vs. the power of treaty. The conclusion was that treaty does not supersede local laws in this case. However, in the process, the court found that the California Alien Law violated the 14^th amendment, which is about civil rights and personal liberties. Thus, it was ruled unconstitutional and Asian immigrants were granted the right to own property in California. Asian immigrants finally had more room to breathe in.