Roy Beck

Author and lecturer Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, has been one of the most visible chroniclers and spokesmen on the effects of mass immigration on quality of life issues in the United States. The Houston Chronicle labeled him “one of the five leading thinkers in the national immigration debate.” 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.

His investigative report, “Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, inspired a 60 Minutes segment and is included as one of the five most important writings of 1994 by the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s The Annals of America. Author of four public policy books including The Case Against Immigration (W.W. Norton, 1996) — which is still used to teach an immigration course at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Beck has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, as well as NPR and numerous national radio programs. He regularly briefs members of Congress on immigration issues.

A former chief Washington correspondent for the Booth Newspapers chain, Beck was a journalist for three decades before founding NumbersUSA. He was one of the nation’s first environment-beat newspaper reporters in the 1960s and won national awards for his coverage of urban expansion issues in the 1970s, including honors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Izaak Walton League. In addition to his article for The Atlantic Monthly, Beck’s byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and the Journal of Policy History.

Lead author of a series of sprawl studies, Beck’s most recent study, Outsmarting Smart Growth: Population Growth, Immigration, and the Problem of Sprawl, is based on data from the Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Last fall, he presented his findings to the national conventions of the Society for Environmental Journalists and the California Chapter of the American Planning Association. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have relied upon and cited his sprawl studies.