Author Roy Beck, Founder and President of the NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation and NumbersUSA Action, has been one of the leading shapers of the national immigration debate since the early 1990s.

NumbersUSA is the nation’s largest organization for immigration reform, with a half-million activist members. Its activists and its Capitol Hill legislative staff were credited in sources as diverse as the New York Times and the Washington Times with leading the defeat of the 2007 Bush-Kennedy amnesty in the Senate.

Roy established NumbersUSA in 1997 to carry out the immigration-reduction recommendations of President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and of the bi-partisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by the late Barbara Jordan.

Before founding NumbersUSA, Roy was a journalist for three decades, winning nearly two dozen awards for covering environmental topics and issues interrelating ethics, religion, and public policy.  He is the author of many books, monographs, studies and academic journal articles about those issues and about the effects of U.S. immigration policies on America’s natural resources, quality of life, individual freedoms and labor force.  His Re-Charting America’s Future book was used by more than 7,000 high school debate teams. His The Case Against Immigration (W.W. Norton, 1996) is still used in many university classrooms.

Roy’s investigative report, “Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, is included as one of the five most important writings of 1994 by the Encylopaedia Britannica’s “The Annals of America.”

He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. One of the nation’s first environment beat newspaper reporters in the 1960s, he has worked for the Newhouse, Gannett and Booth newspaper chains in several states, was the Washington Bureau Chief of Booth Newspapers and associate editor of the national United Methodist Reporter. He has filed stories from most states and from a dozen foreign countries.

His byline has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Journal of Policy History, the Wilson Quarterly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, and the Los Angeles Times.  His series of national sprawl studies has been cited widely, including the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), a bulletin of the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign. The prestigious Foreign Affairs journal has 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.

He has made presentations at forums such as World Affairs Councils, WorldWatch’s State of the World conference, the Smithsonian Institution’s annual seminars for college deans, the Aspen Institute, and the Diplomats and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR) annual conference. He has spoken at universities across the country, including Stanford University’s Hudson Institute, Rockefeller lectures at Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and George Mason University. Groups spanning the political spectrum have requested him at the podium — from Federations of Republican Women to the Women’s National Democratic Club to the American Reform Party national convention to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco.

A native of the Missouri Ozarks, Beck enjoys playing guitar and banjo and two decades of volunteer work with his church’s teenagers and building houses for the working poor with Habitat for Humanity. A U.S. army draftee, Beck was awarded the Army Commendation Medal in 1972. He and Shirley have been married since 1970 and have two married sons.