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NumbersUSA, founded in 1997, is one of a trinity of closely related policy organizations dedicated to restrict immigration flows. It describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy organization that favors an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.”
The other two major restrictionist organizations based in Washington, DC area are the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
NumbersUSA was the lead organization is mobilizing grassroots opposition to the proposed comprehensive immigration reform bill that the Senate was considering in June 2007. Its organizing efforts proved a tremendous boost to its membership base. It now boasts that it counts on 640,000 members with an average of 1,300 members in every congressional district.
The executive director of NumbersUSA is Roy Beck, a former environmental journalist who has become one of the leading voices for immigration restrictions. Beck is the author of one of the major books advocating immigration restrictions. The Case Against Immigration (1996) catapulted Beck into the national spotlight, and a year later Beck founded NumbersUSA.
NumbersUSA “opposes efforts to use federal immigration policies to force mass U.S. population growth and to depress wages of vulnerable workers.” It is “is pro-environment, pro-worker, pro-liberty and pro-immigrant.” Simply put, Numbers USA says it is an “immigration-reduction organization.”
NumbersUSA defines two goals: 1) “To examine numerical levels of annual legal and illegal immigration; and 2) To educate the public about immigration-reduction recommendations from two national commissions of the 1990s, namely the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (headed by Barbara Jordan) and the report of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development—both of which recommended reducing immigration flows.”
NumbersUSA explicitly disassociates itself from the type of nativist and racist immigrant bashing of many local anti-immigrant organizations. Beck focuses on the numbers of immigrants – legal and illegal – and takes care in his pronouncements, reports, and videos to say that immigrants themselves are not the problem but rather a failed immigration system that he says has allowed too many immigrants into the United States in the past few decades.
According to Beck, “Nothing about this website should be construed as advocating hostile actions or feelings toward immigrant Americans. Even illegal aliens deserve humane treatment as they are detected, detained, and deported.”
Moreover, Beck says that “not only is it ethically wrong to engage in such stereotyping, it is tactically short-sighted. There is much to suggest that most immigrants already among us would support reductions in immigration numbers. The reasons are not surprising. Virtually any reduction would be even more beneficial to foreign-born Americans.”
NumbersUSA and Elections
Commenting on the Obama and McCain candidacies, Beck told the Los Angeles Times, "These two guys were pretty much at the bottom of all the candidates. They're the worst, the bottom of the barrel, that ended up winning."
“That's the reality we're dealing with: a choice we don't consider a choice," said Beck. "The chances of influencing one of these two guys to take a pro-worker, pro-environment position are very low.” However, he said that "bringing public pressure to bear to not dismantle enforcement and improve border security has some chance of success."
NumbersUSA tracks the immigration positions of congressional candidates and members, as well as presidential contenders. It sponsors the Americans for Better Immigration website (www.betterimmigration.com) that grades candidates and notes the ones that are “True Immigration Reform Candidates.” While not endorsing candidates, NumbersUSA does promote the reelection of the members of the Immigration Reform Caucus.
Americans for Better Immigration “believes the problem with immigration today is not the individual immigrant but the numbers. ‘Better’ immigration is lower immigration.”
While Beck, like other restrictionist leaders, is not pleased with either presidential candidate, he says NumbersUSA is focusing on building local opposition to liberal immigration reform and support for such restrictionist bills as the SAVE Act.
In Beck’s view, a Democratic Congress "doesn't necessarily mean bad things for us." He points out that some freshman Democrats who beat Republican incumbents in 2006 are tough on illegal immigration because "they need a way to show people that they're different from the party leadership."
"We've spent the last seven years separating the Republican back bench from the party leadership with tremendous success," Beck told the Los Angeles Times, adding that his sights are now on the Democrats. "We'll continue to push that line hard."
NumbersUSA and the Environment
From its beginning, NumbersUSA has stressed the links between immigration, population growth, and environmental loss. The banner of its website features the high peaks of a Rocky Mountain range, implying that increased numbers threaten that pristine environment.
In 2008, however, NumbersUSA has stepped up its educational efforts around immigration and environment themes. It is a member of the new restrictionist coalition called America’s Leadership Team for Long Range Population-Immigration-Resource Planning, which in June 2008 placed large ads in such national publications as the New York Times and The Nation. One ad shows an eight-lane highway clogged with stalled traffic with the caption: “One of America’s Most Popular Pastimes.” Another ad shows a bulldozer plowing through a forest with the provocative caption: “One of America’s Best Selling Vehicles.”
In the traffic congestion ad, the member groups – Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), NumbersUSA, Social Contract Press, and American Immigration Control Foundation – state: “We’re the nation’s leading experts on population and immigration trends and growth.”
Since its founding in 1996 NumbersUSA has sought to make immigration one of the leading culprits for environmental loss and urban sprawl. Its latest promotional video is called, “What’s Causing All the Traffic?”
In collaboration with the Center for Immigration Studies, Numbers USA published a series of reports linking immigration-fueled population growth with urban sprawl.
Authored by Beck and NumbersUSA analyst Leon Kolankiewicz, the reports contend the immigrants cause sprawl in the following four ways: 1) Direct settlement by immigrants in the suburbs; 2) High fertility creates larger second generation of households, and children of immigrants desert urban cores by higher margins; 3) Immigrants facilitate movement of natives to outer edges; 4) Natives flee immigrant concentrations.” Not mentioned is the fact that most immigrants settle in urban centers, where in many cities they have been central to urban revitalization in abandoned downtown districts.
In Outsmarting Smart Growth, Beck and Kolankiewicz write: “There are three sources of our national population growth—native fertility (in conjunction with increasing life spans), immigration, and immigrant fertility. We know this about their contribution to long-term growth: Native fertility remains well below replacement level and has not been a source of long-term U.S. population growth since 1971. Immigration and immigrant fertility (births to foreign-born mothers), on the other hand, are far above replacement.”