NumbersUSA was founded solely by Roy Beck in 1996 to promote civil debate on the immigration recommendations of two distinguished Commissions on immigration. Beck, an environmental journalist, became interested in immigration after working on his April 1994 article in The Atlantic which featured the struggles in the small town of Wausau in the heart of Wisconsin’s dairy country to accommodate an influx of Southeast Asian refugees.

Beck, along with Jim Robb, Anne Manetas, and Rosemary Jenks, began to work with the then emerging world wide web and the concept of a web site that empowered voters with both knowledge and tools to communicate directly to their elected officials.   Although antiquated today, the “SEND FAX” capability of NumbersUSA was a breakthrough use of old and new technology which allowed those who visited the web site to send a fax, via the services provided by NumbersUSA, directly to their elected official.

NumbersUSA began promoting the immigration recommendations of the two distinguished Commissions which had been the genesis of NumbersUSA.

1995 – U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform (commonly known as the “Barbara Jordan Commission”)

1993 – President’s Council on Sustainable Development (Pres. Bill Clinton)

In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas). Many of the Jordan Commission’s recommendations to strengthen immigration enforcement were included in the legislation, including the creation of the Basic Pilot Program, which would later become the E-Verify system. However, with the untimely death of Chairperson and Representative Jordan the Commission’s suggested reforms for legal immigration were stripped from the legislation before passage. As a result, NumbersUSA shifted its focus to educating and empowering the public to achieve the Jordan Commission’s sensible approach to immigration.

In the late 1990s, NumbersUSA became the first grassroots advocacy organization to provide citizens the opportunity to fax their elected representatives, providing them with a much-needed voice in the immigration debate. Until that time, Congress mostly heard from Big Business and the special interest groups who lobbied for immigration expansions.

In the ensuing years, NumbersUSA steadily grew its membership and improved its technological capabilities while remaining relatively unknown to the national political leadership.

In 2007, the national spotlight was shown on NumbersUSA when it was credited by the New York Times with derailing an effort led by Pres. George W. Bush and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would have expanded legal immigration and granted amnesty to millions of illegal aliens by mobilizing such high volumes of activism that the number of faxes and phone calls shut down the Congressional switchboard.

NumbersUSA built on its 2006-07 victory by expanding its membership to more than 2 million grassroots activists by 2012. However, at the same time, NumbersUSA’s founder, NumbersUSA itself, and NumbersUSA’s public foundation supporters, came under harsh attack by immigration expansion advocates with false claims of xenophobia, nativism, and even white supremacy. Lead by now discredited Southern Poverty Law Center’s practice of placing political opponents on their once respected “hate group” list, NumbersUSA persevered the maelstrom of backlash by being open and transparent with its financial information, standard practices, and by pointing to long standing and still standing principles displayed on its web site and practiced in its materials that focus solely on the numerical aspects of immigration while actively advocating for “no immigrant bashing” yet strongly advocating for immigration-reduction policy.

Between 2010-2012, NumbersUSA empowered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama, and other states to achieve state-level immigration enforcement laws, including E-Verify mandates for most businesses. In a study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in 2017, it was concluded that these efforts and E-Verify state laws were highly effective in reducing the illegal alien presence in a state and reducing unauthorized immigrant employment.

In 2013, NumbersUSA’s grass roots mobilization of voters was again instrumental in preventing S.744, the “Gang of 8” amnesty bill, from becoming law. Like the ’06-07 legislation, S.744 had prestigious legislative advocates, this time including four Democratic and four Republican Senators, and would have expanded legal immigration, increased guest worker programs and granted amnesty to more than 10 million illegal aliens.

Legislative movement regarding immigration from 2013 thru 2023 had been at a standstill with many contested bills never becoming law despite both a Democrat (Obama) and Republican (Trump) unified Congress. Trump brought national focus to the mounting issues surrounding immigration volumes, both legal and illegal. Biden brought unparalleled volumes of illegal immigrants entering into the United States under the premise of creating “legal pathways to citizenship” with most recent Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) figures showing over 2 million annual apprehensions by CBP in addition to the 1 million legal immigrants approved by Congress.

With the majority of those apprehended having been released into the interior of the United States through loopholes and abuses of the parole and amnesty provisions of Title 8 of the US Code, “Aliens and Nationalities”, the 2023 House of Representatives in May of 2023 passed H.R. 2, “The Secure Border Act”, to close those loopholes and to restore operational control of the border.

Just prior to such, in October of 2022, NumbersUSA founder, Roy Beck, retired. The NumbersUSA Board of Directors made what it considered a “bold choice” to select someone from outside the immigration movement and chose former tech executive James Massa as its next CEO. Massa is the grandchild of Italian immigrants and was living in the border state of Texas, as well as, had worked for years within the Washington DC beltway. Massa served as Vice President of Federal Operations for internet giant and Fortune 50 company, Cisco Systems. During his time based in Washington D.C. he chaired the Internet subcommittee for the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Council to the President of the United States both for Clinton and Bush. After leaving Cisco in 2006, Massa acted as interim CEO, COO, and advised a number of global non-profit organizations in their founder transitions. For 10 years prior to joining NumbersUSA, Massa ran Loom Enterprises, a C-Suite consulting company for high tech, green tech, and bio-tech companies. Upon starting at NumbersUSA, Massa made it clear that he would continue to focus of founder Roy Beck on immigration reduction with a focus on what NumbersUSA calls “sensible immigration”.

Shortly after Massa joined NumbersUSA, the organization played a key role in stopping several 117th Lame Duck Congress attempts to pass immigration legislation including the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have allowed into the United States 80,000 unvetted persons from Afghanistan, the Eagle Act, which would have dramatically increased and reshaped the H1B Visa program by removing the country caps for such visas, and several other immigrant increasing legislative actions. NumbersUSA also played a key role in the House of Representative’s passage of H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, in 2023. This legislation addressed the root causes for a number of recent border surges by requiring all businesses to use E-Verify, closing a number of asylum loopholes, and reforming a number of policies that have led to the catch and release of illegal border crossers into the interior.

Under Massa’s guidance, NumbersUSA has continued its strong position of influence with Congress on Federal immigration legislation and has formalized a state level initiative to bring mandatory E-Verify to a majority of states. This initiative gained rapid traction in July of 2023 in Florida with passage of S.B. 1718 which had E-Verify as a centerpiece of immigration legislation.  This strong legislation expands the use of E-Verify to private employers with 25 or more employees covering 90% of all employees in Florida. Similar legislation is under consideration in Texas, where Massa testified to the state Senate, and West Virginia, where in the WV 2023 legislative session E-Verify passed unanimously through the WV Senate and is expected to pass in 2024 through the WV House..

Other initiatives started by Massa include The Hiring Line Initiative which is intended to address the economic justice concerns for those US citizens disproportionately impacted by high immigration levels. Based on the last book written by founder Roy Beck, “Back of the Hiring Line, a 200-year history of immigration surges, employer bias, and depression of Black wealth“, NumbersUSA intends to educate and influence Black voters whose communities and jobs are begin negatively impacted. The initiative has begun with a focus on providing materials and civil forums to discuss the topic at Historic Black Colleges and Universities.

NumbersUSA continues to reach across the breadth of conservative voters whose immigration interests are centered around law and order to those more liberal voters whose immigration interests are grounded in the impact that immigration-driven population growth has on the environment, conservation, and sustainability.