Most Recent Posts

Some soul-searching is on the agenda as the Republican National Committee holds its winter meetings in Charlotte, N.C.

November's elections were a big disappointment for the GOP. The party has now lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections.

Exit polling shows the party has a serious problem attracting young voters and minority groups, even as the nation becomes steadily more diverse. Republican voters are older and more white than the nation as a whole.

On top of that, a new NBC-Wall Street Journal poll gives the GOP an approval rating of just 26 percent. So Chairman Reince Priebus has posed some questions to party members nationally in a video posted online: "What do you think the party must do better? Where do we go in the future? This is your chance to make your voice heard — and we're listening."

Svetlana Anikeeva was 15 in the early '90s when she visited America as an exchange student.

"And it was completely different place in every imaginable aspect," she recalls.

Anikeeva grew up in Vladivostok on the eastern edge of Russia, and studied abroad in Savannah, Ga., where the experience, she says, changed her life.

"The people were different. The culture was different. The weather, the food, the school. Everything was fascinating," she says. "I knew that I wanted to come here."

Today, Anikeeva is in the U.S. on a temporary visa and runs a successful luxury car exporting business with her husband.

To receive permanent U.S. green cards for herself and the entire family, she applied to the EB-5 visa program — a federal initiative targeted to foreigners who can invest at least $500,000 in an American-based business. If their money creates at least 10 jobs, then the person seeking entry receives a permanent green card.

While analysts expect President Obama to push ahead with plans to overhaul the U.S. immigration system this year, the administration has already demonstrated support for the EB-5 program. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be opening a new office by summer to oversee the program and address the booming interest.

Anikeeva was one of 1,021 people who applied back in 2009, compared with the 6,106 who applied in 2012.

"It's a pretty rigorous selection process," she says.

The program drew Anikeeva to Seattle, where American Life Inc. built a hotel in the Pioneer Square neighborhood with EB-5 money. The company is pooling Anikeeva's $500,000 with other investments to develop the neighborhood and generate new jobs.

EB-5 money is a source of funding that more and more real estate development companies are relying on, says Henry Liebman, the president of American Life.

"Since 2008, the bust, it's even a more important source of capital, because at least in real estate there's some lending, but not near what it was," Liebman says. "So this is more important than it used to be."

Since it began in 1990, the EB-5 program is credited with creating nearly 50,000 jobs, and has poured more than $6 billion into the U.S. economy.

But its reputation isn't so grand within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as Jim Ziglar noticed when he served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President George W. Bush.

"There's a general aversion to the idea that people can buy their way into legal status in the United States, particularly when INS is dealing with so many people that have other reasons for being here — family and refugees and asylum seekers," Ziglar says.

Fraud has also been an issue with the EB-5 program, as some companies promise to create jobs, but instead run off with the money.

Svetlana Anikeeva says she hopes to find out within the next six months if her permanent visa is approved. But for now, she's enjoying watching her 13-year-old daughter, Nina, soak up U.S. life.

"She's a sports person. She's in synchronized swimming," Anikeeva says.

Nina is about the same age as her mother was when she came here to study all those years ago.

"She's actually just been accepted to the gifted student program for summer in Princeton University," Anikeeva adds. "Which would be unbelievable for me, at the age of 13. I'm very proud of her."

For Anikeeva — and other "globally well-to-do" from China to India — an American education alone is worth the $500,000 price tag.

When the Internet offers a superabundance of material to read, watch, listen to and play, it's easy to skim over text and half-listen to broadcasts. But the British government is inviting schoolchildren to put down their cellphones, turn off their news feeds and spend a long time lingering over a poem — so long that they learn it by heart.

The United Kingdom's Department for Education is funding a nationwide poetry-reciting contest called Poetry By Heart, similar in structure to Poetry Out Loud in the U.S. and other poetry competitions in Canada and Ireland. The contest, at the county level, requires students to memorize two poems from a list of 130 choices and recite the poems by heart in a series of competitions.

English poet Jean Sprackland helped select the poems at the heart of the contest. She joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss the pleasures of poetry memorization.

Neil Jordan is best known as a filmmaker — he directed The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and the Showtime series The Borgias — but he began his career as a writer. His first novel, The Past, was published in Ireland in 1980 to great acclaim.

The novel follows an enigmatic protagonist on his search for his family's secrets in a Cornish seaside town. Jordan joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about The Past, which has been reissued in the United States by Soft Skull Press.