As long expected, a backlash to the Irish-specific visa has now arrived, with Roy Beck, president of the Washington-based anti-immigration group Numbers USA, telling the Boston Globe that the Irish are “basically upset because they don’t have the special privileges that they once had,” and should not be given favor ahead of other groups.

“They have to share those privileges with Latinos and Africans and Asians,” he said.

Numbers USA, an organization that promotes and organizes around attrition through enforcement, writes that “the goal is to make it extremely difficult for unauthorized persons to live and work in the United States. There is no need for taxpayers to watch the government spend billions of their dollars to round up and deport illegal aliens; they will buy their own bus or plane tickets back home if they can no longer earn a living here.”

Numbers Executive Director Roy Beck writes this week that it is “a concept of handling the illegal alien population with something between mass legalization and mass deportation. Simply put, you take away the things that drew illegal aliens here and let most of them self-deport. Most especially, you take away the jobs magnet.”

The Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA, another group that wants to slow immigration, pegged Romney early as one of the most consistent GOP candidates on the issue. "Everything is about attrition through enforcement with him," NumbersUSA President Roy Beck said in December.

Krikorian said his 2005 attrition-through-enforcement paper crystallized the various solutions that immigration hawks had been touting for years into a single phrase. "When I came up with the term, it was somehow 'revolutionary.' But it was inherent in everything that the pro-enforcement people have been saying all along. It's just that we needed a label." Romney has now made the label famous.

The head of an immigration-reduction organization says one Republican presidential hopeful has dramatically improved his grade on immigration issues.

Until recently, Rick Santorum had received a "D-minus" on the immigration grade card compiled by Numbers USA. But Roy Beck, founder and president of the immigration think tank, says the former Pennsylvania senator has raised his grade to an "A-minus" based on some comments he made at a recent event in South Carolina.

Roche said she was also taking a closer look at former Sen. Rick Santorum, who received an A- grade from NumbersUSA, a group that champions reduced immigration to the United States. The group rated both Santorum and Romney "excellent" on opposing "Amnesty/Legalization," but said it could find no record of Romney supporting lower overall immigration levels, both legal and illegal. He received a C+.

Myrtle Beach voter Michael Comer, 60, who heads the group Grand Strand Citizens for Immigration Reduction, also said he would vote for Romney. He said he liked some of the ideas put forward by Ron Paul, the only candidate who has said that children of illegal immigrants should not be automatically granted citizenship if born on U.S. soil, according to NumbersUSA. But Comer said he thought some of Paul's other ideas about government were unworkable.

The school’s announcement has drawn some criticism from immigration hardliners in Colorado, including Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, but others have said they are fine with school’s decision as it provides no preferential treatment to undocumented immigrants.

“I have no problem with,” said Roy Beck, the head of NumbersUSA, an organization that favors strict immigration policy. “I would not think it was a good thing if they were giving preferential treatment to illegal aliens over a student from Missouri or somebody from Peru who applied for a student visa, but this doesn’t seem like what they’re doing.”

Immigration seems set to play a large role in the primary. A group called Numbers USA has been running commercials that call on Congress to tighten immigration rules. A diverse cast of characters — white, black, Asian and Hispanic — ask, “Should Congress give new work permits to 1 million new legal immigrants again this year when 20 million Americans of all colors, national origin and religion are having trouble finding jobs?”

Numbers USA is going up on television and radio in South Carolina to push the presidential candidates to oppose immigration.

NumbersUSA announced on Tuesday that it will spend at least $100,000 on advertising before the South Carolina Republican primary on Jan. 21 in an effort to tie high unemployment levels to legal immigration.

Here in the U.S. our population problem is driven chiefly by immigration, both documented and undocumented. According to Jeremy Beck of Numbers USA, since 1990 immigration numbers have been higher than in any other period in U.S. history. Over the last two decades, immigration has averaged about 1 million people per year, or three times our historical average. U.S. population will more than double from 203 million in 1970 to 439 million in 2050 and immigration will cause 82 percent of all U.S. population growth between 2005 and 2050.