While I highly support US investing there more, it’s not something that gives US blue collar jobs in the rural America. And push for more manufacturing in USA is about that.
The US should be focusing on decoupling the need to be able to survive (food, housing, healthcare) from holding a job instead of pushing for bringing back these jobs that are not likely to ever come back.
At the moment regional differences in the price of manufacturing labor are so large that corporations are basically labor market arbitrageurs. But arbitrage opportunities are by their nature kind of ephemeral, ending when the relevant markets stop mis-pricing things.
Your POV seems to be that labor is correctly priced in the current cheapest labor market (the "Race to the Bottom" hypothesis) but I don't know that this is automatically true. It's at least possible that one can only arbitrage the price of labor in developing markets for so long until they develop and drive up the local price of labor, and until they are all developed.
"The Jobs Ain't Comin' Back" is an appealing position for professional automators like us, because it lays the credit for manufacturing labor market dynamics at our own self-important feet, when in actuality it's shaped largely by brutally exploitative and probably transient (on the scale of decades, though) labor-price arbitrage. In particular the current manufacturing labor market artificially rewards centralization because the profit made by labor-price arbitrage is so large compared to shipping costs.
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that manufacturing is either Sweatshops or Robots in the long run.
This is a fairly optimistic point of view, IMO. What I think is much more likely to happen is the following cycle:
1. Manufacturing comes to a new place due to low wages (relative to the cost of labor in the previous place), lax environmental regulations, low tax rate for corporate profits, and very low worker safety regulations.
2. This goes well for 20-40 years, but as things typically do, environmental regulations are put into place by the local government, the tax rate rises to pay for the externalities of the low wages, and workers organize, agitate, and win higher wages, more safety regulations, and worker protections. All of this raises the cost of labor.
3. Manufacturers move to a new location because it is much cheaper. This causes people in the old location to lose their jobs, become impoverished, and craters their economy to the point where the government, implored by all of these laid off and angry workers, need to do something to help the situation. This results in a lowering of wages, rolling back of environmental regulations, lowering the corporate tax rate, and repeal of the safety regulations and worker protections.
4. Twenty years later the manufacturers come back to the country because people have become so desperate for jobs that moving back to the country is relatively cheaper compared to the country that manufacturing just moved to.
Just view the policy decisions with respect to manufacturing that the leaders of the United States and Mexico have proposed to "bring back" these blue collar jobs. It all follows this playbook.
To the extent that this is true, one cause is that governments (with the notable exception of China) handicap themselves by honoring agreements, which they absolutely do not have to do absent a bigger, badder government to make them. A savvy, Machiavellian US government policy would:
1. Promise corporations the world
2. When factories are built, expensive machinery shipped in, and personnel trained, renege and hike taxes, but not so much as to force a write-off
3. When foreign governments make it difficult for US corporations to operate factories abroad and they ask for diplomatic support, shrug and tell them play stupid games, win stupid prizes
4. Do not apply the above policy for US corporations doing natural resource extraction abroad.
(i.e. act more like China)
It probably won't be in my lifetime, but my kids need to plan for the day when there isn't a cheap labor source waiting to tap. It will be a good problem to have (think about all the engineers making life better), but it will be a problem.
Which at the moment looks to be china, despite textiles trying to move to lower cost countries, the magnetic force of ongoing factory automation in china might pull them back. The US deindustrilized to early for any of these really to come back without some seriously focused "billionaire" class investors putting their money first (aka Musk).
That is a lot of spending that could be transitioned to robotics if humans become too costly.
1: https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/2019-training-industr...