NumbersUSA is primarily a grassroots and lobbying organization that mobilizes its members to pressure elected officials to reject pro-immigrant legislation and to approve harmful anti-immigrant legislation both at the federal and state levels. NumbersUSA has become deeply influential among lawmakers at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The group has a deep level of influence over President Trump’s immigration policies.
About
- Roy Beck founded NumbersUSA in 1996. Initially, the organization operated as a program of John Tanton’s foundation, U.S., Inc.
- The group fosters anti-immigrant sentiment to mobilize its grassroots base for political action.
- NumbersUSA directs thousands of calls and emails to members of Congress to defeat legislation, attempts to influence primaries in support of nativist candidates, and attempts to shift the national conversation around immigration further to the right, in concert with other members of the organized anti-immigrant movement.
- NumbersUSA has become deeply influential among lawmakers at the highest levels of the U.S. government. It has driven the introduction of anti-immigrant legislation that has, in turn, helped NumbersUSA catalyze additional anti-immigrant organizing. NumbersUSA has built relationships with a number of elected officials, once honoring Jeff Sessions with its Defender of the Rule of Law Award. The group also has held events and coordinated with other elected officials including Ken Paxton, Steve King, Tom Cotton, Lou Barletta, Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs. Rosemary Jenks, the longtime director of government relations for NumbersUSA serves as a bridge between the organization and Congress.
- NumbersUSA, like FAIR, often works with state-based anti-immigrant groups such as the Dustin Inman Society.
- Beck, the group’s executive director and Tanton’s “heir apparent,” previously stated that “the aim should be to halt all immigration possible.”
- NumbersUSA helped to provide the Trump campaign with its immigration policy framework during the 2016 Presidential race. In October 2016 Beck told Reuters that in addition to having met with the candidate personally and people “at the top” of his campaign, the group had shared with them a ten-point immigration plan. Of the ten points, six were echoed by Trump in his major immigration speech in August 2016.
Anti-immigrant Views
- NumbersUSA says “no to immigrant bashing” but Beck bragged about doing his best to make “immigration radioactive in as many places as possible,” and has said that the goal should be to “halt all immigration possible.”
- In addition to serving as the former Washington editor of Tanton’s racist publication The Social Contract, the group’s executive director Roy Beck spoke at multiple events organized by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens in the late 1990s.
- Beck was once interviewed on the “Alien Invasion of the US,” by Jeff Rense, according to an archive of his interviews. Rense runs a blatantly anti-Semitic website.
- During a 2016 Reddit ask me anything, Beck entertained racist questions and policy proposals, advocated for temporary bans on refugees and slashing legal immigration by 75%, called immigration a “program of forced population growth,” and said that “Refugee resettlement is mainly about some people in rich countries making themselves feel morally superior rather than responding to the greatest needs of the refugees.”
- Beck has stated that integration of immigrants in Europe is unlikely to be successful “unless they do what the U.S. did in the 1920s.”
- Beck published a population control paper with fellow immigration restrictionist and immigrant scapegoater Leon Kolankiewicz titled, “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating, U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History.”
- Beck, who has advocated against the TPS program for years, has praised the Trump Administration’s decision to terminate protections for many of the program’s hundreds of thousands of recipients, and railed against a court injunction which blocked the Administration from doing so.
- In 2008, the NumbersUSA President rejected calls for Haitians to receive TPS after devastating storms ravaged the country.
Anti-immigrant Activity
- NumbersUSA and Beck have spent decades advocating for policies designed to shrink the overall immigrant population in the U.S.
- In addition to spending millions of dollars on radio and television ads, from 2001-2018 NumbersUSA spent over $7M in lobbying dollars, and from May 2018 to August 2019 the group spent nearly $900,000 on Facebook ads attacking immigrants.
- Like FAIR and CIS, Beck’s group has an unprecedented amount of power and influence over President Trump’s immigration policy, and the results have been disastrous. Perhaps most notably is NumbersUSA’s work to end DACA and derail permanent protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age. In addition to publicly pressuring President Trump to end the program, NumbersUSA spent over a million dollars working to derail bipartisan talks on protections for these immigrants.
- Ahead of a vote on H.R. 6, the Dream and Promise Act, NumbersUSA urged its supporters and members of Congress, including some Democrats, to vote against the measure. The group placed Facebook ads targeting a number of moderate Democratic representatives including some freshman members.
- Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, has publicly supported the strategy led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue the Trump Administration over DACA including in a NumbersUSA newsletter on July 28, 2017, in which he praised the “Paxton ultimatum:” “Ken Paxton is providing a way for Pres. Trump to finally honor his campaign promises to stop this DACA program for perhaps a million young adult illegal aliens to gain work permits. The Paxton ultimatum gives the President an excuse to reject the advice of his pro-amnesty advisors and to stop issuing work permits that he said as a candidate are unconstitutional.”
- In 2012, NumbersUSA coordinated with former IRLI lawyer Kris Kobach on the Crane v. Napolitano case, the suit that pitted ICE against the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and set the stage for United States v. Texas, and the subsequent legal attacks the program has faced. The same day Kobach filed the lawsuit on behalf of ten Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, NumbersUSA announced that it would financially support the legal effort against DACA. In a blog post that read more as a fundraising appeal than an announcement, Beck said the ICE agents’ legal team would be “funded entirely by NumbersUSA member contributions.”
- The group has used its grassroots network to drive calls and faxes and write letters to lawmakers during both the Obama and Trump Administrations, urging representatives to support policies and amendments attached to must-pass bills offered by anti-immigrant representatives in the House and Senate. Policy proposals have ranged from removing work authorization from DACA recipients to forbidding undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. at a young age from serving in the military, rescinding the program altogether to harsh interior enforcement policies. They have also stridently supported ending birthright citizenship, dramatic cuts to legal immigration, including ending family-based immigration, and increased border wall funding.