|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Numbers USA Credited for Immigration Bill Defeat
Last month's defeat of a comprehensive immigration bill can be largely attributed to a group called Numbers USA, The New York Times says. Numbers USA had been lobbying Congress for a decade to reduce the number of immigrants — legal and illegal — in the United States. It sent more than a million faxes to Capitol Hill and armed like-minded senators with information to buttress their arguments. "It was a David-and-Goliath struggle,” Roy H. Beck, the president of Numbers USA, told the Times. "We built a grass-roots army, consumed with passion for a cause, and used the power of the Internet to go around the elites and defeat a disastrous amnesty bill.” The immigration bill would have offered legal status and a path to citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants and created a new temporary worker program while increasing border security.
Story Continues Below "Numbers USA initiated and turbocharged the populist revolt against the immigration reform package,” Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigrant advocacy group, told the Times. "Roy Beck takes people who are upset about illegal immigration for different reasons, including hostility to Latino immigrants, and disciplines them so their message is based on policy rather than race-based arguments or xenophobia.” Numbers USA has more than 447,000 members, with an increase of 83 percent since January alone. Now it will work to increase enforcement of existing laws and new measures to curb the employment of illegal immigrants.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2010 NewsMax.Com |