Exclusive — Rep. Mary Miller: Banning Chinese Land Purchases in U.S. ‘Should Be Bipartisan’

Placing a moratorium on foreign land purchases and Chinese companies’ efforts to buy up U.S. farmland “should be bipartisan,” said Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL), following the discovery of a now-destroyed Chinese spy balloon in American airspace.

“We are on a dangerous path. We’ve known for a long time that we have been allowing ourselves to be too economically dependent on China,” Miller said during an interview with Breitbart News Saturday host and Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle.

“Joe Biden is just focusing on Americans as being domestic terrorists instead of focusing on our true adversaries. I can’t even imagine what will happen if we lose our self-sufficiency in farming, and we need to take this threat very seriously,” she continued. 

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Breitbart News broke the news on Friday that Miller will reintroduce a bill on Monday entitled “Save American Farms from Adversaries Act.” The legislation is meant to protect U.S. food security, help stabilize housing prices, and would give the president power to prohibit the purchase of public or private real estate in the United States “by any foreign person,” including corporations and partnerships, for the five-year period after the enactment of the law. 

Miller’s bill, which will be her first in the 118th Congress, states that Chinese nationals have “led foreign investments in homes in the United States for the past seven years” and points out that in her own state of Illinois “foreign companies and individuals have purchased 853,813 acres of agricultural land…worth approximately $6.3 billion.” 

“My husband and I are actually involved in agriculture. We raise grain and cattle, and we live in a rural area. So firsthand, I can tell you that the people locally are very concerned about this,” Miller told Boyle. “We did introduce [the bill] a year ago…but since then, we know that hundreds of thousands of acres of farm ground has been purchased by China and other foreign entities….We need to be aggressive and stop foreign land purchases — specifically farmland,” she said. 

Boyle pointed to a video former President Donald Trump released on Friday, talking about how “China has many thousands of spies working in the United States in business, finance, academia, technology, media and likely, even government, very sadly.” In the video, the 45th president further detailed how President Joe Biden, upon taking office, demanded the shut-down of an initiative aimed at Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft. Miller warned that the whole world will be impacted if the United States allows China “to take our country down.”

“So yesterday I was actually with President Trump, and he loves our country. He’s strong — he was a strong leader and decisive. And, he [said], ‘shoot the balloon down.’ He was always aggressive with our enemies, which gave us peace in the world through American strength,” Miller said.

“The whole world is going to be impacted if we allow China to take our country down. President Trump was addressing the threat that China was. He understood that they had infiltrated all of our institutions, and he was being aggressive and going after that,” she continued. “And now we have a man who is compromised. Our national security is compromised because Joe Biden is compromised.”