Roy Beck is a former journalist and public policy analyst who has served as the Executive Director of NumbersUSA since 1997. Beck was a journalist for three decades before founding NumbersUSA. He is former Washington D. C. bureau chief of Booth Newspapers and one of the nation's first environment-beat newspaper reporters. Beck was also the Washington DC editor of John Tanton's magazine The Social Contract, and a frequent speaker on population, labor, and immigration issues. Critics have often pointed out his use of unscaled charts to recruit members for NumbersUSA.

A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Beck won national awards during the 1970s for his coverage of urban expansion issues, including honors from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Izaak Walton League. In addition to the advocacy of immigration reduction, much of his work focuses on urban planning and sprawl-related matters.

Beck's April 1994 article in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Ordeal of Immigration in Wausau," brought national media attention and commentary to the issue of mass immigration. The New York Times credited Beck's NumbersUSA organization with applying enough pressure to U.S. Senators to defeat a comprehensive immigration bill in June 2007. He has been described as a "tutor" for U.S. Representative Tom Tancredo on immigration issues.