Several years ago, federal immigration authorities established a fake university with a real physical office, a real internet presence, and a real admissions process. As part of the scheme, they even got the board that accredits universities to say the fake institution was accredited. And so international students, in fact, applied to the fake university that gave every appearance of being real, and when they were accepted they arrived in the US with student visas and paid the tuition they owed.

The catch: the fake college was actually a sting operation designed to catch people seeking to engage in “pay to stay” scams where they pretended to be students in order to enter the country, but no education was provided. Even though it’s true that the fake university did not, in fact, offer any classes, the students weren’t the scammers, they were the ones who were scammed — they sincerely believed they were enrolling in an American university to receive an American university education. But nonetheless, hundreds of students who enrolled in the government’s fake school were arrested and deported. The good news is that courts have ruled these students are now able to sue the government over the whole thing, but that doesn’t answer the question of how on earth did the federal government come to carry out a scam… and arrest people over it… as part of an effort to crack down on scams? Can we get the FTC involved in rooting out this form of fraud, too?

Make it make sense.

Almost 1 in 5 Americans live in locations that can fairly be described as “left behind” — places where population growth, income growth, and investment have lagged the rest of the country throughout this century. It’s mostly the kinds of places you’re probably picturing — deeply rural communities in the South, pieces of the industrial Midwest, and the like.

It turns out something amazing has been happening in these places, according to a new report from the Economic Innovation Group: from 2020 - 2023, jobs have grown more than four times faster in “left behind” areas than in the four previous years. And as the chart below shows, new businesses are being formed in these communities at an impressive clip. While they still lag behind the growth rate of the rest of the country, these left-behind communities are now seeing new businesses being created at a faster rate than the rest of the country had experienced before the pandemic. There’s still much to be done to close the gap, and it’s remarkable to see yet more evidence that, for the first time in a long while, the whole country is growing together.

Everyone knows that whatever its merits, a Dior purse that sells for $2,800 doesn’t cost anything like $2,800 to produce. There’s markup in every step of the production cycle, and that’s just how the luxury goods business works. But still, it’s a bit of a shock to learn that the Italian-made handbags cost just $57 to manufacture… and that they are made by workers employed by third-party contractors to labor in substandard conditions without required safety equipment.

It’s the kind of unsettling story we’ve all been reading about since the Kathy Lee Gifford Walmart sweatshop scandal of the 1990s, but what’s remarkable here is the depth of the investigation by Italian authorities that uncovered these conditions — they even mapped electricity consumption at the factory to determine that, in violation of the law, they were engaged in "seamless day-night production cycles, including during the holidays." Even more remarkable is the penalty: the subsidiary of Dior that makes the bags has been put under court supervision, stripping corporate executives of direct control of the offending operations. 

Civic Action
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