Roy Beck
October 28, 2014
“Immigration in the United States”
Executive Director
NumbersUSA
Roy Beck is Founder, President and CEO of NumbersUSA, the nation’s largest grassroots immigration-reduction organization. Membership is approaching three million registered online activists. The NumbersUSA website ranks among the top 5 for user traffic among advocacy organizations on any issue. The power of the organization lies in its ability to enable individual citizens to advocate effectively to their Representatives for laws and policies which would be beneficial to US citizens.
The motto of NumbersUSA is “Pro-Immigrant ; Anti-Mass Immigration”. Current needs in the U.S. are for sharply reduced legal immigration of all types, an end to toleration of illegal immigration, cessation of magnets for illegal immigration, an end to benefits for illegal immigration such that people here illegally leave voluntarily, and a wide understanding among the US public of the highly damaging effects of mass immigration on all aspects of the lives of our citizens.
Roy Beck entered the field of immigration as an early reporter of environmental issues. He received numerous awards for his ground-breaking reporting of environmental issues, population effects on the environment, and business, religious, and moral aspects of public policy. In 1995 the bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by the civil rights champion Barbara Jordan, invited his extensive participation. In 1996 he founded NumbersUSA to advocate for the implementation of the Commission’s recommendations , and those recommendations remain highly relevant to the present. Since 1996, his policy analyses have been widely published and sought at premier sites such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Christian Science Monitor, and PBS.
NumbersUSA is widely acknowledged to have been the pivotal force behind the failures of the major efforts to pass additional mass amnesties in 2007, 2013, and 2014 to the present time. His seminal publication from 1996 is now being cited by organizations representing groups which have been especially harshly disadvantaged by the current wave of immigration.
See: Roy Beck, 1996. “The Case Against Immigration: The Moral, Economic, Social, and Environmental reasons for reducing U.S. Immigration Back to Traditional Levels”.
See: National Center for Public Policy research. 9/22/14. “Throughout U.S. History, Immigration Surges have harmed Black Workers.”
See: www.numbersusa.com/
Roy Beck’s Bio:
Roy Beck is President and CEO of NumbersUSA, the nation’s largest grassroots immigration-reduction organization with more than two million registered online activists. Its website routinely ranks in the top five for user traffic among advocacy organizations on any issue. For 20 years, he has led research on the effects of mass immigration on quality of life issues in the United States. The prestigious Foreign Affairs journal stated that nobody has made a more persuasive case for cutting current high levels of immigration. “All sides can learn from Roy Beck,” said Business Week Magazine.
Roy is an author of four public policy books, a national lecturer and a veteran reporter of the Newhouse and Gannett chains and other newspapers based in Michigan, Ohio, Missouri and Texas, and is a former Chief Washington Correspondent for Booth Newspapers. A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, he was one of the first 10 environmental beat reporters in the country. He has reported from more than 30 states and a dozen countries in Latin America and Asia, with numerous awards for coverage of non-government humanitarian efforts, of environmental, development and population issues, of business, and of religion, ethics and public policy.
His policy analysis has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Politico, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, the Journal of Policy History and dozens more. He has been appearing for years on PBS and all the national cable news networks, as well as numerous college campuses.
He started NumbersUSA.com in 1996 to carry out the recommendations of the bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform after the death of its chairman, civil rights champion Barbara Jordan. The commission had invited him in 1995 to meet on the basis of his Atlantic Monthly reporting which was chosen by the Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the most important contributions of American writing in the 1990s.
A recipient of the U.S. Army Commendation Medal (non-combat) in 1972, he has been married to Shirley, a pediatric physical therapist, since 1970, has two married sons and has devoted much personal time for three decades to Habitat for Humanity, leading teens in summer work weeks for the poor, teaching Sunday school and assisting in community assistance to impoverished immigrant and other minority communities.