Beck spent years working for John Tanton who named him his “heir apparent,” before founding NumbersUSA in the mid 1990s. Beck has worked for years to make life as difficult as possible for immigrants living in the United States so that they will “self-deport.” He does this by advocating for harsh attrition-through-enforcement policies and dramatic cuts to legal immigration levels. In fact, he has said that the goal should be to “halt all immigration possible.”
About
- Roy Beck, who is the author of the book entitled The Case Against Immigration, founded NumbersUSA in 1996. During its fledgling years, NumbersUSA was housed under John Tanton’s U.S. Inc. umbrella.
- Beck serves as the group’s president and has sought to popularize an extreme immigration-reduction agenda, most famously through his dehumanizing “gumballs” video and presentations.
- It directs thousands of calls and emails to members of congress to successfully kill legislation, and seeks to influence primaries in support of nativist candidates and shift the national conversation on immigration to the right—in concert with other members of the organized anti-immigrant movement. Beck and his longtime colleague Rosemary Jenks have sought to build robust relationships with members of congress in order to help scupper any and all immigration reform efforts.
- Beck, NumbersUSA and the policies they advocate for have helped to inform the Trump Administration’s actions on immigration.
- In 2011, Beck joined Mark Krikorian at a Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) event to mark the 10 year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Anti-immigrant Views
- Beck served as the former editor of Tanton’s publication The Social Contract.The journal published the work of a number of white nationalists, such as Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDARE.
- Beck spoke at multiple events organized by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens in the late 1990s.
- Beck has led his group’s effort to shrink the immigrant population by attrition through enforcement measures and by radically slashing annual immigration levels.
- During a 2016 Reddit ask me anything, Beck entertained racist questions and policy proposals, advocated for temporary bans on refugees, slashing legal immigration by 75%, called immigration a “program of forced population growth,” and said, “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.”
- 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.”
- 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.
- In August 2019, Beck told The New York Times, that without the funding from Cordelia Scaife May’s Colcom Foundation, his group would “be functioning at a very different level.”
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 Beck’s group 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 advocate for an end to DACA and derail permanent protections for young immigrants. 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.
- Beck 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 what he called 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.”
- Beck and his group have used their grassroots network to drive calls and write letters to lawmakers under both the Obama and Trump Administrations, urging representatives to support policies and amendments attached to must-pass bills in the House offered by anti-immigrant representatives like Steve King, Mo Brooks, Paul Gosar and former Rep. and current Sen. Marsha Blackburn. Amendments and other 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, deporting DACA recipients, harsh interior enforcement policies, ending birthright citizenship and dramatic cuts to legal immigration.