The sort of work traditionally handled by cheap offshore labor is now the sort of work most ripe for replacement by AI. So it’s burning the candle from both ends. The low value stuff is getting replaced by AI and not sent there and the high value stuff struggles to get delivered by cheap labor because the play was always cost of and not the quality of the talent.
Partly that push was created by the labor unions, who pushed the cost of doing manufacturing business far above what was profitable and feasible.
When the environment becomes hostile to conducting business, then jobs will leave and local industries atrophy.
BTW - with or without unions manufacturing was profitable in the US before NAFTA and China entering WTO. So your narrative that manufacturing was dying because of labor unions does not hold much water.
My fear is that if US becomes hostile to foreign tech workers, they will simply create alternatives to US Big Tech in other countries and US economy will suffer.
Current US domination of global tech is partly because of foreign tech talent.
Manufacturing offshoring started in late 90s in small part due to NAFTA and then accelerated when China entered WTO in early 2000s (thank you President Clinton for this one).
The manufacturing employment trend shows this quite clearly I think: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp
Speaking as an Irish person who grew up in the 80's, this isn't true as there were loads of US companies manufacturing in Ireland back then. There were even clothes manufacturers until the mid 90s.
So I'd probably agree more with the OP here, perhaps the Asian outsourcing happened in the 90s (but even then, loads of my toys as a kid were made in Taiwan), but this has been happening for a while.
It's potentially related to the relaxation of capital controls that happened in the 70s.