Nothing. Nothing, past tense, stopped them: they already have an office there.
I didn't say "outsourcing", outsourcing is where you have a different company do the thing (who may or may not be in the same country).
What I am describing is "offshoring" (specifically where it's the same company, though this is not strictly necessary for the word "offshoring").
> yet they haven't done it to date
As of June 30, 2026, we employed approximately 223,000 people on a full-time basis, 121,000 in the U.S. and 102,000 internationally. Of the total employees, 89,000 were in operations, including product support and consulting services, datacenter operations, and manufacturing and distribution; 77,000 were in product research and development; 43,000 were in sales and marketing; and 14,000 were in general and administration. Certain employees are subject to collective bargaining agreements.
i.e. 45.7% of their staff never even needed a US visa, green card, or HB-1.
This might be very nice for some time, but if you "artificially" keep up local wage levels by limiting worker mobility you might set yourself up to lose the whole industry to lower wage countries (see e.g. European automotive sector).
US was investing in AI powered self-driving tech, China was investing in new EV motor and battery tech with advanced manufacturing automation to cut costs, EU makers were just reselling diesel engines with fancy badges hoping the EV and self-driving fad will pass. EU car industry went from decades of being the global trend setter in terms of designs and technology, to being the follower, at least in technology.
Also, a lot of the manufacturing costs in EU not just for the auto sector, is now majority made of taxes, compliance, bureaucracy and labor's cost of housing. If you import workers they'll be under the same high compliance rules, and same expensive housing pressures, unless you bet they'll accept to live in slum-like conditions in order to undercut the locals, in which case you might as well cut the facade and just advocate for return to slavery.
European carmakers are where they are because electromobility reset their legacy advantages (a lot of which they built up more than half a century ago on much cheaper wages); now the same dollar amount gets them less R&D output than in China, because engineers are more expensive, and production itself is difficult to keep competitive for the exact same reason (also why a lot of car production has shifted east into lower wage European countries long before Chinese cars became competitive).
If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well (I'm not saying that would be desirable, just that it's a given).
Wrong, auto-sector wages back then were much higher in regards to local purchasing power (especially on the housing front) and also unions were much stronger. Now they're already lower class jobs. A VW factory worker could buy a house and take his family on vacation with a stay at home wife. Good luck with that today when you see how much housing prices have outpaced wage growth since then.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
You forget EU car makers have factories outside the EU, in places with much cheaper labor and less regulations. As do Japan's car makers.
>If wages were significantly lower because of more labor migration, the industry would (obviously) be more globally competitive as well
Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would still have a globally competitive cotton industry.
> just that it's a given
Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
The west's industry marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market. If your western cars aren't cutting edge and innovative you failed. And they aren't cutting edge and innovative because you didn't invest enough in R&D at the right time, because you valued short term shareholder returns, basically the plague of most western corporation.
Yes, but many of their billions of R&D spending are still spent on (globally) very well paid (local) engineers. Not saying this is bad, but makes it harder to compete.
> Well, if we just never freed the slaves, we would have internationally competitive cotton.
The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
> The west marches on high end innovative exports, not competing in the cheap nicknack market.
This is an overgeneralization. E.g. Several of the most successful German companies are grocery retailers (as boring and low-tech as it gets).
> Are ASML and Airbus selling well because they're cheap to make or because of their unique innovations competitors can't easily replicate?
I'm not saying you can't pay out globally uncompetitive wages as long as you're sitting on an R&D advantage, but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them (just consider the Japanese electronics industry in the 80s/90s for example; people said the exact same shit back then until they no longer could).
Not true anymore. They spend more on bean counters, marketers, managers, consultants, lawyers, etc than on engineers.
>The US still is the leading exporter of cotton.
Because of imported cheap labor or because of automation at scale no country can match?
>but your low-end un-innovative neighbours will catch up to you when R&D is much cheaper for them
Only if you make poor deals where you voluntarily give them all your hard earned technology in exchange for access to their market. Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
If you want to keep higher local wage levels, you rely on other comparative advantages (easier access to capital, better education, better political stability), and all those tend to erode over time. As they do, you either lose your wage advantage or the whole industry, there is no alternative.
> Otherwise Mexico and Russia would be industrial superpowers catching up to EU and the US, if all it took was neighbouring you and having cheaper labor than you.
They are! Just compare vehicle production for an easy proxy: Mexico had >100% growth over the last 2 decades, while US numbers are basically flat. Russia is a bad example now because of war, but they did a lot of catching up before.
If your theory is that all western manufacturing struggles just because every single company is stupid and spends too much on lawyers and accountants then I don't know what to tell you.
America is the #3 exporter of cotton in the world, and the world leader in manufacturing and exporting the harvesters (John Deere, Case International) which have replaced those slaves as pickers of cotton.
The facts of the matter support your point much better than your counterfactual did (I do realize you probably did not intend to be taken literally here).
And I disagree that it has been show in har foreign labor depreciates domestic labor. In fact economic research has shown the opposite. If that were the case then we should make it illegal for people from West Virginia and Idaho to migrate to New York or SF.
Immigration adds to both supply and demand. It’s not at all clear that the effect should be suppressed wages.
That's a (citation needed) right there.
The literature on the matter finds little to no effects of immigration on local wages. See the literature review by Kerr & Kerr:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16736/w167...
Key sentence in the conclusion: "The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows."
What you find in practice is both that immigrants accept lower wages, AND that local wages for natives are unaffected. Which happens because the labor market can generally take in the new labor comfortably.