YEAR-END REPORT


from NumbersUSA President Roy Beck



YOU DID IT!
Blocked the 'inevitable' 2013 Amnesty...
...but Boehner and Obama are making
pre-holiday threats about 2014.

Do you remember a year ago when nearly every pundit or politician with a prediction was saying passage of "comprehensive immigration reform" was virtually inevitable in 2013?
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

That's why I wrote to all of our members last December saying, "By the end of this letter, I want to give you a Christmas present that I crave for myself. I crave reassurance that the immigration battle is not going to be lost in 2013, so my chest will stop aching and I can take some moments to enjoy the holidays."

You remember how hard it was at that time to believe in hope, don't you? But thousands of citizens like you refused to give in to despair. You DID provide the necessary financial resources that I requested. THANK YOU. And hundreds of thousands of you acted week after week for 12 months, using the tools that NumbersUSA was able to provide.
How does 5.6 million sound? That is how many faxes you wrote and we at NumbersUSA sent to elected officials to thwart all the efforts for amnesty and immigration increases this year. (Below, you will see some of the many other markers that explain why we -- you! -- won against incredibly larger opponents.)
And now, Congress is on its way out of town until next year without sending any immigration bill to the White House!

NEW DANGERS, NEW NEEDS
Preventing the "inevitable" in 2013 definitely has strengthened many of the congressional blockades that we will need next year.
But the danger remains real. The need for citizen mobilization remains urgent and absolutely necessary. Without a repeat of what we did together in 2013, there is a significant chance that our nation will be saddled with some kind of amnesty and major increases in legal immigration in 2014, even if not at the draconian level of the Senate-passed S. 744 bill.
Please consider a generous end-of-2013 investment in NumbersUSA's 2014 battle effort. As much as I want you to savor the 2013 victory as described below, I really need your help to ensure that our citizen-powered, public-interest effort has sufficient funding to stand up again to the wealthy open-border goliaths of industry, media and unions.

The greatest threat is in the immediate weeks ahead. The White House is crowing that the bi-partisan agreement on the budget not only opens the calendar for achieving its goal of a massive increase in foreign labor but that it shows there now are enough Republicans ready to help Pres. Obama do it.
At the same time, House Speaker Boehner has hired a former top official of John McCain's amnesty machine to be his personal aide in persuading a majority of House Republicans to approve a vote on the amnesty that Boehner clearly desires. And many national Republican consultants, pundits and party leaders are urging Boehner after his recent tirade against opponents of his budget deal to break his promise that he wouldn't bring any immigration bill to the House floor without majority Republican support.

HOW WE PROVED PUNDITS & POLITICIANS WRONG
Perhaps half the ways we mobilized our members can't be specified in this letter because I don't want to lay out these tactics so easily for our opponents to see. But I CAN show you some data that give you a pretty good indication of the power behind our success in stalling, weakening and eventually blocking the amnesty efforts that we were told somewhere in the media nearly every day were sure to happen.
Along the way, how about some examples of the confidence of our opponents:
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
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.
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
EMAIL EDUCATION:
We spread information about the details of legislation and the day-to-day dangers in the congressional process through 180 million emails.
From March 28, 2013:
“. . . I'm confident we can get it done, certainly before the end of summer.”
-- President Barack Obama, USA Today
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.
From April 10, 2013:
“. . .advocates of reform are saying it now looksinevitable that the U.S. immigration system will be overhauled.”
-- Financial Times
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 Zuckerberg's FWD.US pro-amnesty page and considerably more than the DNC's 650,000 and the RNC's 1.2 million.
From June 11, 2013:
“I think by the end of the year, we can have a bill.”
-- Speaker John Boehner, ABC's Good Morning America

FACEBOOK ENGAGEMENT:
Facebook carefully tracks an “engagement rate” that measures the level of activism among each organization's 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, journalists have repeatedly asked me 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 didn't seem to show up at all.
It's really no mystery. They have tons of money, but we have real citizen 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: Most Americans oppose even 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.
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 in delivering that superior citizen message.

IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT OF CONCERN
FOR THE NATION'S 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 can't 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.
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.