To Chairwoman Abrams, Vice Chair Miller, Ranking Member Thomas, and members of the House Public Safety Committee, thank you for this opportunity to provide opponent testimony for Substitute House Bill 1.
Because I understand my allotted testimony time is limited, I will be brief. First, this testimony addresses the impact of HB 1 on individuals and their purchase or acquisition of personal, residential property. That is, we choose not to concentrate on HB 1’s impact on commercial interests, business properties, and so on.
Second, we recognize Sub. House Bill 1 is better than House Bill 1, as introduced. Welcome changes included exempting legal permanent residents from HB 1’s provisions. Another positive change is HB 1 is no longer applied retroactively, forcing people to divest themselves of property they have owned for years or decades, without incident or accusation. The ACLU of Ohio is grateful for these improvements.
Still, HB 1 remains what opponents all along accuse it of being. That is, a resurrection and modernization of the various exclusion laws stretching from the 1880s to the middle of the 20th century.
In this particular case, House Bill 1 forbids the acquisition of real estate, arguably throughout all of Ohio, to anyone with foreign citizenship deemed a threat to Ohio, or the United States, as largely determined by one person, the Ohio Secretary of State.
The reference to HB 1 applying to all of Ohio comes from HB 1’s application to critical infrastructure facilities and military properties. Under current law, unchanged by HB 1, critical infrastructure facilities are numerous and widespread, including such nearly ubiquitous locations as railroad tracks, utility poles, telephone poles, telephone lines, utility lines, fiber optic lines, and also including, but not limited to, refineries, ports, trucking terminals, dams, steel plants, and much more. The point being, I believe one would be hard-pressed, in even Ohio’s most rural locations, to find property not within 10 miles of any of these various locations and buildings.
With regard to the secretary of state’s broad authority to create, utilize, and designate targets for property ownership exclusion, the restrictions on that authority are few. HB 1 requires the secretary of state to “consult” several lists developed and used by the federal government to determine the risk and security status of foreign entities and individuals. But the secretary of state is not bound by HB 1 to actually incorporate any or all of those lists, except the secretary of state is not permitted to designate entities and individuals not on those lists on their own exclusions list.
Otherwise, like with HB 1, as introduced, the ACLU of Ohio is concerned Sub. HB 1 violates any number of (at least): The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the federal Fair Housing Act, and is unnecessarily duplicative of the federal Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, which requires vetting of many of the types property purchases targeted by HB 1. Although, it should be noted this law does not apply to single houses or residences, presumably because Congress recognizes national security is not implicated by such individual purchases and ownership.
At its core, HB 1 is highly discriminatory and unnecessary. It impacts our family, friends, loved ones, neighbors – your constituents – who are not suspected of, nor accused, arrested, indicted, penalized, or convicted of any wrongdoing. Their only “crime, ” their sole infraction, is to have been born in a country our federal government and the Ohio secretary of state deem a direct or indirect threat plus their desire to establish roots in Ohio via property ownership.
Instead of welcoming newcomers hoping to build a future for themselves and their families in the Buckeye State, HB 1 treats people as suspicious, undesirable, disloyal, and security risks, the same discredited rationales used throughout the sordid history of exclusion laws in our country. HB 1 supporters simply have not made an effective case this type of legislation is needed.
For all these reasons and more, the ACLU of Ohio urges this committee’s rejection of Substitute House Bill 1.
