A video from 2010 of Roy Beck, the founder of NumbersUSA, explaining US mass migration using gumballs, has gone viral. The fact the video is circulating again underlines how Beck’s immigration message remains such a driving force.
“Some people say that mass immigration into the United States can help reduce world poverty. Is that true? Well, no it’s not,” Beck said in the video. NumbersUSA, an advocacy group for limiting legal and illegal immigration, says the presentation has gotten more than 140 million views on various platforms over the years.
The video was shared last week by former GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck to 536,000 of his X followers — it has tallied more than three million views. “Starbuck added, “If you watch this and you’re still for mass migration because you think you’re a humanitarian, I’m pretty sure you’re a lost cause.”
In a statement, NumbersUSA CEO James Massa repeated that the video’s “powerful imagery” still strikes because it serves as a reminder of how ridiculous increasing immigration into the U.S. to solve global issues would be in real life.
“It makes it very obvious, it’s very sensible, we have to have laws, we have to have a border, we have to have some way we make a conscious decision in terms of how many people come to the nation, so I think it’s common sense that resonates,” he told Fox News Digital last week.
Beck introduced the concept in his 1996 keynote address, with an update during a presentation on September 10 –11 at XP2010. Gumballs were used by Beck to represent one million people and glass jars for each country he included, like the U.S., in his thoughts on immigration.
“In Africa alone there are 650 million people who make less than $2 a day,” Beck said, also displaying glass jars filled to the brim with gumballs that symbolized people in India and China who qualified as “desperately poor.”
“Finally, there’s 105 million of Latin America’s population that are desperately poor,” he said, adding up to 3 billion people in the world who qualify as extremely poor, according to a definition of extreme poverty given at the time by the World Bank.
“Of course, we don’t pull our immigrants from these desperately poor populations, do we? These people are too poor, too sick, too disconnected to make it here as immigrants. We tend to pull our immigrants out of the better-off poor of the world,” he said, with Mexico exemplifying that kind of immigrant.
He also argued that people who have the potential to change their own countries are being recruited by America, and therefore depriving nations from having them.
Immigration continues to be a top issue in 2024, with Vice President Kamala Harris getting knocked for failing in her role of “border czar” under the Biden administration. Her response to that vexing immigration crisis has generated backlash, presenting a challenge as she seeks the White House.
