I always thought it was preposterous. Why should people (workers) be uprooted and move, rather than capital (money)? The latter is supposedly much easier to move around.
So, I am glad Americans are finally coming to some common sense.
A financial economy, or an IT based economy can be more centralised and can be located wherever the talent is.
My point is this. Of course, for mining and heavy industry, it makes sense to build factories in a given place, and move people to them, everybody does that. But the Czechia underwent deindustrialization in the 90s, and the moving was touted by economists for the so-called "service economy" (which we were supposedly moving to after liberalization). So I am talking about the idea that people have to move on the whims of the financial capital, the modern ruling class. That's insane, and you still see it, for example, everybody is investing in Sillicon Valley, despite high living costs for the working class there. There are also negative examples, where factories (supposedly hard to move) get suddenly moved because of the tax or other incentives, which don't favor the investors.
The difference is, investors (people who make decisions where to put capital) try to externalize the negligible cost (if any, sometimes it's simply a herd behavior) of investing at different places onto society, where it becomes a pointless but large cost of moving labor around. But a sane society, in my opinion, should rather let people live where they live and let the capital chase them (which is, with the exception of heavy industry, and possibly some intelectual endeavours, Akademgorodok comes to mind, what communists did). It is a choice every society can make. And as I mention earlier, the sanity check is, if you truly move people around only as much as is necessary from the production point of view, then the wealth should appear in the regions based on industries which are not easy to move (because of the additional incentive for the workers to move).
Second, there was never really a need to rush to move to another location offering better opportunities. As consequence of the 1990s policies the local capital vanished into the hands of western entities and with it the opportunities worth moving for. The post 2000 capital which moved to the region just found spots with cheap labor to build new factories or logistic centers to keep the German powerhouse running. With an unfair advantage of cheap eastern energy, cheap eastern workers across the border and cheap euro currency as a result of sharing it with the unproductive european south.