I read with interest your Feb. 9th front page article on “Foreign Holdings.” The article described a Chinese business tycoon who has invested in American property as well as Canadian property, not just a little but over 230,000 acres in the U.S. alone.

The point of the article is that this foreign investor from China is to be scrutinized. I would think that a person from whatever country who has made his home in America over the past seven years and owns several homes in the U.S. worth millions of dollars on top of his large land holdings worth many more millions is paying several millions of dollars in property taxes every year. That means to me that this investor is committed to our system of paying taxes that keeps our infrastructure sound.

I believe that journalism needs to be careful of calling out any person specifically when there is a whole lot more to the story. The need to sell newspapers with sensational bylines that prompt unjustified fears in your readership may seem like a wise business decision as it increases newspaper sales but the bottom line is that this or any investor in U.S. soil must find U.S. companies to manage, harvest, process and sell the goods off the land they purchase.

The idea that foreign businessmen are going to reap our resources unscrutinized is remote as someone in that chain from land to consumer is bound to deal with some form of government involvement that implements regulations on what they do.

To those who fear that these forested lands could be harvested and the logs shipped to China, I say that is already happening with U.S. businesses loading ships with logs from Lewiston to Portland as the markets in the Far East pay more than the domestic markets for the logs.

Dave Barrett

Naches, Wash.