The major problem in America is not foreign competition. The barrier to industry is not opening up relations with China.
The major problem in America, and has been since at least the 1970s is a managerial crisis. It is a crisis imposed on the working class by incompetent monolithic bureaucracies in government and in corporate culture.
The problem is exactly the sort of problems imposed on the public by things like the "Jones Act". It is that incompetent buffoons attempt to impose rules on the country to accomplish one thing, which fails utterly, and then has a whole host of undesirable side effects that are aggressively ignored and/or downplayed by apologists like yourself.
It is this managerial crisis that saw the rise of massive conglomerates in the 60s and 70s that ate up industry all over the midwest, liquidated them, and leveraged the assets to purchase more small and medium business. This was considered marvels of efficiency then... which in actually has turned out to be a series of accountancy scams and pyramid schemes that all hinged on exploiting incompentely design regulation.
It is the protectionism and subsidies and cronyism in this country that has destroyed it's competitiveness.
It has never been, and probably never will be, the willingness of the American worker to compete with foreign labor.
Advocating for more protectionism and cronyism and regulatory capture is going to make the problem worse, not better.
IF you need proof of this look no further to what the Federal government has done to the semiconductor industry in the past year.