Roy Beck
Roy Howard Beck is a former journalist and anti-immigration activist who founded and has served as president of the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA since its inception in 1997. He is former Washington, DC bureau chief of Booth Newspapers and an environment-beat newspaper reporter, formerly with "The Grand Rapids Press" and "The Cincinnati Enquirer". Beck was also the Washington, DC editor of John Tanton's white nationalist magazine "The Social Contract". Career. Beck is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before founding NumbersUSA, Beck worked as the Washington editor of Social Contract Press , which has been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and described as both white nationalist and racist by The Guardian. The company has printed a number of explicitly racist works over the years, such Jean Raspail's racist fantasy novel "The Camp of the Saints", aside from the material in their flagship journal. The New York Times credited Beck's NumbersUSA organization with applying enough pressure to U.S. Senators to defeat a comprehensive immigration bill in June 2007. He has been described as a "tutor" for U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo on immigration issues. Beck has  gained notable attention via a disputed presentation where he used gumballs to show that immigration to the United States did not alleviate world poverty, because so many remained impoverished outside of the United States. The conclusion was that the United States should restrict immigration more and help the impoverished where they are, instead of allowing them to migrate to richer countries. David R. Henderson, an economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, responded to Beck's video, "By comparing one gumball (one million people) to over 5,000 gumballs (over 5 billion people ), he gets his audience thinking that one million people don’t matter because they are such a tiny fraction of 5 billion. But one million people do matter." Henderson also noted that Beck makes it seem as if allowing immigration is done at a cost to Americans, but that is not what research on the issue indicates. According to the "Washington Post", before Donald Trump's election to president, Beck had "been marginalized in Washington as an eccentric figure whose views some consider xenophobic or even racist."