BACK
of the
HIRING LINE
by Roy Beck
“A ROBUST and STARTLING
Two-Hundred-Year Account”
– American Affairs Journal
PREVIEW
Back of the Hiring Line: Chapter 3, part 1 - Displacement of Northern Free Blacks
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- Back of the Hiring Line
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REVIEWS
of Roy Beck books
BUSINESS WEEK:
All sides can learn from Roy Beck . . . Beck presents a powerful argument that immigration hurts America’s working poor”
WASHINGTON POST:
Always balanced and never strident . . .Perhaps most cogent is his discussion of the negative impacts immigration has had, historically and contemporaneously, on Black Americans”
NEW YORK TIMES:
. . . fosters serious debate rather than name-calling . . . [analyses are] presented carefully and dispassionately and deserve serious answers”
FOREIGN AFFAIRS JOURNAL:
. . . as persuasively as anyone, he states the case and marshals the evidence for restricting the high levels of legal immigration”
LOS ANGELES TIMES:
. . . puts the argument in terms that liberals can relate to”
ATLANTIC MONTHLY:
. . . a powerful—indeed, nearly overwhelming—case against the status quo”
BOSTON GLOBE:
Beck documents the way employers have used cheap immigrant labor to slash pay or worsen working conditions in blue-collar jobs”
NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE:
. . . a forceful re-examination of the oft-held assumption that we should continue the open door immigration policy that has been in effect since the 1970s. When I began the book I was inclined to support current policy. Having read it, I’m inclined to change my mind. . . . He argues that the aims of the 1960s Great Society programs . . . have all been undermined by one policy: liberal immigration laws”
ABOUT the AUTHOR
Roy Howard Beck, has written extensively since the 1960s about competing values and interests in key racial, environmental, and economic issues of American life — as a religion reporter, daily newspaper beat journalist, Washington Bureau Chief, roving national/international correspondent, author of more than 20 books and monographs, and contributor to journals, magazines, and social media. He has researched and published on the effects of immigration policies on Black Americans since the riots of South Central Los Angeles in 1992. The Encyclopedia Britannica chose an Atlantic Monthly article by Roy for its Annals of America book series as one of the writings to best represent U.S. social and economic developments in the 1990s. But he probably is best-known for using thousands of colorful gumballs in a short TED-style video presentation on the global ethics of immigration policy that has been viewed more than 200 million times through viral postings by others. He founded the bipartisan NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation after Barbara Jordan’s death in 1996 in large part to study and educate on her findings and recommendations as chair of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. The 2026 BACK OF THE HIRING LINE book is the greatly-expanded Second Edition of Roy’s 2021 book of the same title. New research and material composes approximately one-third of the new book, with the addition of a full index, a new Introduction, and photos of historic Black writers featured in the saga.
© 2021 Back of the Hiring Line. All rights reserved.
