NumbersUSA
Roy Beck


The inevitable amnesty of 2013 THAT DID NOT HAPPEN!


From January 30, 2013:
“Comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for immigrants who came here illegally will likely pass Congress this year with broad bipartisan majorities."
-- Mark Salter, Real Clear Politics
From April 10, 2013:
“. . . advocates of reform are saying it now looks inevitable that the U.S. immigration system will be overhauled."
-- Financial Times
Let us savor how citizen mobilization & persistence proved the power elites wrong . . .
. . . and lets prepare to do it again in 2014.

5.6 million. That is how many faxes you wrote and we at NumbersUSA sent to elected officials to thwart the amnesty that was proclaimed virtually inevitable by nearly every pundit, politician and power broker who made a prediction earlier this year.

And that really is just the tip of the iceberg of the myriad ways we mobilized individual citizens into a critical political mass capable of persuading enough Members of Congress to block a massive increase in immigration. Phone calls, visits to home offices, attending town halls, letters to the editor, comments on news websites, and much more.

THE RESULT: Congress is on its way out of town until next year without sending any immigration bill to the White House.

CELEBRATE!!!
Warm and cheer yourself over the holidays with knowledge of what you have accomplished as an engaged citizen. You fought the most powerful people and institutions of America who spared no expense attempting to give out 33 million new lifetime work permits to citizens of foreign nations over the next decade.

We were able to accomplish the mobilization of citizens because of people like you who made donations allowing NumbersUSA to have the tools and staffing ready to engage in the daunting political battle. THANK YOU.

Please make an end-of-year donation so we can vigorously fight the high-priority effort that both Pres. Obama and House Speaker Boehner have promised for passing their amnesties and greatly increasing the flow of foreign labor in 2014.

I'm sure you have been reading many of the boasts from high-level Republican operatives and White House Democratic aides that the recent budget agreement opens the way for the massive immigration expansion they were so sure they would get in 2013. The danger is real. But we also know from experience that we can stop them.

As our Jim Robb consistently tells you, we can never match even a fraction of the funds available to the open-borders lobbies. But to counteract the power of their funds, we do have to have a large enough amount of contributions to support an institution capable of the citizen mobilization we accomplished in 2013. (See further down some of the amazing numbers about those accomplishments.)

IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT OF CONCERN
FOR THE NATIONS NEEDY
What most struggling American households need the most is a job or better wages for the job they have so they can help themselves and not be dependent on the taxpayers or on acts of personal charity.

Know during this Christmas season that your activism this year has given a wonderful gift to the 20 million Americans who want a full-time job but cant find one and to the millions more with wages too low to keep their families out of poverty.

But for your efforts, their chances for a job or for a raise would be greatly diminished by the flood of new foreign labor desired by both the greedy and the reckless of the land. The uncertainty, fear and privation around millions of trees on Christmas morning would be so much worse if not for what you have accomplished this year.

WE PROVED THE PUNDITS WRONG
Remember how discouraging it was the first half of 2013 to read and hear on a nearly daily basis that the 12-year record of mobilized citizens defeating amnesties annually was about to end. Lets draw hope from reading some of that “conventional wisdom” and knowing that we proved it wrong:
From November 14, 2012:
“It now appears that 2013 will be the year that Congress passes real immigration reform.”
-- Frank Sharry, Americas Voice
From January 31, 2013:
“This will be the year that Congress finally gets some common-sense immigration reform across the finish line”
-- Sen. Chuck Schumer, CBS News
From March 20, 2013:
“The good news is that we really do think that . . . on the immigration issue, that we will, before summer have comprehensive immigration reform.”
-- Rep. Nancy Pelosi, The Hill
From March 28, 2013:
“ . . . I'm confident we can get it done certainly before the end of summer.”
-- Pres. Barack Obama, USA Today
From June 11, 2013:
“I think by the end of the year, we could have a bill.”
-- Speaker John Boehner, ABCs Good Morning America

HOW TOGETHER WE DID IT
Perhaps half of the ways we mobilized our members cant be specified in this letter because I dont want to lay out these tactics so easily for our opponents to see. But I CAN show you some data that gives you a pretty good indication of the power behind our success.

Phone calls:
We bought hundreds of toll-free lines and estimate that our members tripled their number of calls into Congress over 2007 during that successful defeat of amnesty. This year in June alone, we handled 347,914 phone calls.

Email education:
We spread information about the details of legislation and the day-to-day dangers in the congressional process through 180 million emails.

Email/website activists:
Our traditional activist army grew from 1.38 million to 1.59 million. Our website routinely rates in the top 10 of all advocacy websites on any issue in terms of number of people educated through visits and time spent.

Facebook fans:
We began 2013 with 35,000 Facebook followers. By November, our NumbersUSA and Stop Amnesty pages had more than 1.7 million followers. These appear to be largely a different kind of citizen than those we have traditionally reached through the email system. So, we have just this year built a second army of citizens who happen to get their information mostly through Facebook rather than regular websites and email. We have 5 times more followers than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs FWD.US pro-amnesty page and considerably more than the DNCs 650,000 and the RNCs 1.2 million.

Facebook engagement:
Facebook carefully tracks an “engagement rate” that measures the level of activism among each organizations fans each week. The industry standard for highly successful pages is a 6% engagement rate. We are extremely proud that in most weeks our engagement rate is 30-50%, far above that of pro-amnesty organizations.
A different approach.
In recent months, I have been asked repeatedly by journalists why the House of Representatives would block “comprehensive immigration reform” when the pro-CIR forces dominated the mainstream news with rallies, protests, fasts, pray-ins, street-shut-downs and all other manner of political theatre while our side didnt seem to show up at all.

It's really no mystery. They have money, but we have real followers. Our side basically avoided theatre and concentrated on connecting individual Americans with their public officials in civil engagement. While their side was putting on a show for the cameras and talking to themselves, we got voters talking to Congress. Hardly any of this is visible to a news camera, yet when it happens thousands, tens of thousands and even millions of times, it has a huge effect.
Our side was also delivering the superior message: Americans oppose considering giving any illegal aliens work permits before all new immigration security and enforcement is implemented. And they oppose doubling the flow of foreign workers, as the Senate bill would do.

That's why we won in 2012. And in 2010. And in 2007. And every other year that Congress has debated amnesty. And it's why we'll win next year, and we'll keep in winning.

Thank you for helping make all of this possible through your contributions this year. And thank you if you are able to make one more in 2013 to help ensure that we can have at least as good of an ending of 2014 as in this year.



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