Steve Cortes, former senior spokesman and strategist for the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns and current head of the League of American Workers, said there is a consensus among Americans that Chinese companies should not be allowed to buy and control American resources, including farmland.
In an article titled “Voters Want China Out of American Farmland” recently published in American Greatness, Cortes detailed a poll that showed a “giant majority” of likely North Carolina voters are in favor of “banning China’s purchases of farmland and other strategic assets in America.”
Cortes explained how surveying North Carolina voters was crucial due to the Tar Heel State representing “the largest agricultural holdings of the Chinese in America, at 150,000 acres.”
“This isn’t just a North Carolina problem, but it’s most significant. They’re the most potent of an issue there. So that’s why we wanted to poll North Carolinians…The astounding numbers we got about this was 74 percent of likely voters in North Carolina who said the Chinese should not be able to own American farmland. Only 18 percent said that they should,” Cortes said during Tuesday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
“Very significantly, when you get those kinds of numbers, it cuts across all demographic and partisan lines,” Cortes added. “For example, even among Biden voters, 20 self-identified 2020 Biden voters from the state of North Carolina, only 29 percent said that the Chinese should be able to buy farmland. Among women…only 15 percent in North Carolina said that the Chinese should be able to own American farmland. So this is an issue where there is just consensus. There is a preponderance, a super majority of Americans, of likely voters in this country, who say, ‘Wait a second, our farmland, this incredibly fertile, abundant farmland that the United States possesses, is a strategic asset of the United States.’ It is not something that should fall into the hands of any foreign source, but certainly not the Chinese Communist Party.”
Cortes also said the issue of American assets being purchased by the Chinese should matter to every citizen because it goes “way beyond” just farmland.
“The Chinese are by far the biggest foreign purchaser of U. S. housing by a mile,” Cortes explained. “Last year, they bought 13. 6 billion homes in the United States. That’s more than double what they bought the year before, which was just over 6 billion homes. So their investment into U.S. real estate on the whole is massive.”
Cortes also said there is a consensus among voters against other foreign entities purchasing American assets, such as Japan’s largest steelmaker recently acquiring the U.S. Steel Corporation.
“I don’t want people to think I’m only on an anti-China rant. I obviously can’t stand the CCP and what it’s done to the United States. But even allies – Japan is obviously an ally, a great friend of the United States – we polled on this as well. We got almost the exact same answer. We asked likely voters in North Carolina, ‘Should foreign corporate takeovers be allowed as strategic U. S. companies that make things like food and steel?’ We specifically cited the Japanese takeover of U. S. Steel. We got almost the exact same answers – 73 percent of North Carolinians said no, should be prohibited, and 18 percent said yes,” Cortes said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
