Viral presentation using gumballs to show perils of mass immigration continues to resonate, 28 years later

An old video of NumbersUSA founder Roy Beck using gumballs to describe the perils of mass migration into the United States went viral again last week, which the group he founded says demonstrates the timelessness of his message.

"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.

Former GOP congressional candidate Robby Starbuck shared the video to his 536,000 followers on X last week, where it got more than 3 million views. He 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."

NumbersUSA CEO James Massa said the "captivating imagery" of the video still resonates because it drives home the point that the world's problems can't be solved by bringing everyone to the United States.

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Roy Beck of NumbersUSA discusses immigration using gumballs as a visual in 2010. (NumbersUSA)

"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 first used the idea in a presentation in 1996 before updating it in 2010. He used gumballs, representing one million people each, and glass jars, representing different countries, including the U.S. and other nations, to explain his views 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. 

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Arrival of Immigrants, Ellis Island, New York City, New York, USA, Bain News Service, 1920 (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Beck said that while "Mexico is poor," "5.6 billion people" in the world live in countries with average incomes lower than that of Mexico. 

"What is it that the elites are telling us?" he said. "They're telling us that when we take" roughly 1 million immigrants into the U.S., that the country is somehow "ackling world poverty, and we have to do it regardless of the effect on our unemployed, the working poor, the most vulnerable members of our society. Regardless of the effect on our natural resources." 

Beck said that the true "agents for change" in undeveloped nations are likely being drawn away from their home countries to the U.S.

"They have to be helped where they live," Beck continued. "99.9% of them will never be able to immigrate to rich countries. There's no hope for that. They have to bloom where they're planted."

"Let's help them there," he said to audience applause. 

The immigration issue continues to resonate in 2024, as Vice President Kamala Harris' role as the so-called "border czar" for the Biden administration has caused her White House campaign headaches due to widespread frustration with illegal immigration. 

Beck's conclusions have drawn their fair share of critics.

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"This ignores the practical realities of colonialism and globalization that have wreaked havoc on different societies across the globe, making infrastructural growth seem like a theory not rooted in reality," one critic wrote in 2017. "It also ignores the fact that many immigrants continue to help their families and communities after leaving."

Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally on June 28, 2024, in Las Vegas.  (Bizuayehu Tesfaye)

NumbersUSA, which Beck founded in the 1990s, describes itself as the largest grassroots single-issue advocacy group in the United States. It worked closely with Barbara Jordan in the 1990s, the pioneering Black Democratic congresswoman from Texas who chaired the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform under President Bill Clinton. 

The commission recommended cutting legal immigration numbers, more strictly enforcing laws against illegal immigrants and bringing in more skilled labor, among other policies that are now more associated with the political right. It also proposed admitting nuclear families of qualified immigrants but not extended families, in order to reduce volume.

Beck has since retired but remains on the board of NumbersUSA. Massa told Fox News Digital the group is not just focused on the southern border, which draws most of the headlines in the ongoing debate over immigration.

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"We just can’t ignore the border, but what we’re really focused on is comprehensive sensible immigration reform, and that includes legal immigration reform as well," he said. "Currently, our nation is focused highly on family-focused immigration, so we are all in support of an immigrant having a nuclear family with them, but we are seeing since the 1960s there’s been a tremendous growth in chain migration."