GOP Oklahoma Senator James Lankford is focusing the spotlight on an unparalleled national security breach that President Joe Biden and his administration have overlooked.
Over one million acres of farmland in Oklahoma are currently owned by foreign entities, including nations like China, according to Senator Lankford, and are “100%” utilizing the land for drug production.
“These are Chinese criminal organizations that are moving in, and you’re not going to move in and move that much money without some awareness of the Chinese Communist Party and setting up. Just in the last year, China has doubled its number of acres in the United States. They’re buying up hundreds of thousands of acres across the country, and they’re moving in criminal operations into the country,” explained the senator.
Foreign purchases of farmland in the U.S. has become a hot-button issue in the wake of the Chinese spy balloon that floated across the country and was brought down by the U.S. military after crossing from Alaska into South Carolina.
The surveillance aircraft’s dayslong flight across the country has re-energized concerns among lawmakers and experts over China’s ongoing efforts to purchase land across the U.S., with some observing a pattern of suspected espionage activities close to American military sites.
Senator Lankford is fighting to repair the “gap in federal law” involving foreign entities’ ability to purchase agricultural land openly and urging lawmakers to “be attentive” to what China is attempting to do on U.S. soil.
Senator Lankford says the U.S. is trying to tackle the problem “piece by piece”
On a Wednesday morning talk show, host Maria Bartiromo asked Lankford, “What are we doing as a country to stop communist China from moving forward on all of these goals to overtake the United States as the number one superpower?”
Lankford reassures Americans saying the U.S. is trying to tackle the problem “piece by piece”
“We’ve got to be able to do our military work. We’ve got to make sure that we have what’s called ‘hard power’ on this to be able to make it very clear that we are the United States of America, and we’re none to be trifled with,” said Lankford.
“The second thing that we’ve got to do is deal with economic issues. Every corporation in America needs to look at the business that it’s doing currently with China. If their supply chain comes from China to the United States, know that the communist nation will, at some point, cut that off. And so they need to be attentive to that in all of their investment strategies and all of their logistics tail — that if they have China anywhere in that logistics tail, that’s a major problem. We’ve got to take world leadership back again and to be able to say we’re the United States in foreign policy and in economic power,” Lankford urged.
