Henry and Agnes (Wieland) Beck welcomed Roy A. Beck into the world on April 21, 1925, in Sioux Falls. He attended Humboldt High School and graduated in 1942. He was born and raised in Spring Valley Township, McCook County. Roy Beck drove for the family’s Beck Trucking and assisted his parents on their farm. He fought in the American Army during the Korean War from 1951 to 1953. In the little Humboldt town of St. Joseph’s Wellington, on February 1, 1954, he married Clarabelle Carls. In addition to raising their son Roger with love, they ran a farm west of Sioux Falls.

Roy loved spending time with his family, especially his grandchildren. His biggest love was assisting his kid on the farm. In addition to assisting his brothers and neighbors in need, he also liked to meet with friends, play cards, and hang out with them. From 1961 until West Central’s merger with Muchow School District 29 in 1970, Roy served on the board. From 1981 through 2004, he served on the Wall Lake Townships Board. He belonged to Hartford’s St. George Catholic Church and was a lifetime member of the American Legion.

The anti-immigration organization NumbersUSA was created in 1997 by Roy Beck, a former journalist, and anti-immigration campaigner. Since then, he has served as its president. He was a newspaper reporter covering the environment for The Grand Rapids Press and The Cincinnati Enquirer before joining Booth Newspapers as bureau head for Washington, DC. John Tanton’s anti-immigration publication The Social Contract, whose editor was Beck, was based in Washington, DC.

A comprehensive immigration plan was defeated in the U.S. Senate in June 2007, according to The New York Times, which praised Beck’s NumbersUSA movement for exerting sufficient pressure. On matters of immigration, he has been referred to be Tom Tancredo’s “tutor.”

Due to a contentious presentation in which he used gumballs to demonstrate that immigration to the United States did not reduce global poverty since so many people remained destitute outside of the country, Beck has attracted significant media attention. The study’s conclusion was that rather than allowing the poor to immigrate to wealthier nations, the United States should impose tighter immigration restrictions and aid the underprivileged there. In response to Beck’s film, David R. Henderson, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, said: “By comparing one gumball (one million people) to over 5,000 gumballs (over 5 billion people), he gets his audience believing that one million people don’t count since they are such a tiny percentage of 5 billion. However, one million individuals do matter. Henderson said that while Beck implies that letting immigration costs Americans money, the evidence on the subject contradicts this.

Before Donald Trump was elected president, Beck, according to the Washington Post, “had been sidelined in Washington as an oddball personality whose beliefs some consider xenophobic or even racist.”

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