And will only be increasingly robotic with advances in AI.
- Anything you can easily automate (like pick & place machines for electronics, industrial robots for welding/assembly) will be automated anyway (no advantage for the US as location there)
- Even if you have 100% automation, you still need to pay (mainly) local workforce to set the whole thing up, and a lot of those jobs are even less competitive in the US wage-wise (construction crews, etc.)
Neither of those calculations is probably going to change much in the next decades. If you want to keep low-wage industry (like PCB assembly, heavy industry etc.) in a country like the US, then you will need to subsidise this with taxpayer money one way or the other (tariffs are essentially just that).
Agriculture is an example where this is already done (for obvious reasons related to people not starving in a trade crisis). But this is somewhat expensive (US agriculture subsidies are ~$20billion/year).
I think this will happen, and that some degree of it is a good idea (for strategic reasons), but framing this as a benefit for the average american is pretty much a lie-- because in the end, the taxpayer is on the hook for those subsidies, all those industries products are gonne get more expensive and other sectors are gonna get dragged down, too, because they have to compete for talent and might suffer from foreign trade retaliation.
Also note that this development (low-skill manufacturing migrates to growing, lower-wage country, then the migration propagates up the tech level) is something that occured basically exactly the same way in the past (with Japan in the 1990s).
> now they have all the factories and they also have rising standards of living so ... seems to be working for them?
This is basically the point of international trade.
Things also worked out for the US, because they reaped the fruits of that cheap Chinese labor-- all-American electronics would have been significantly more expensive.
I'd also like to point out that those living standards are WAY below US levels-- there is absolutely no way that US-americans with comparable education levels would be willing to work in comparable conditions.
Note also that artificially messing with this process has consequences: If the US had forced electronics and heavy industry to stay fully domestic starting in the 80s or so (with tariffs, regulations and subsidies), then their products would have stayed much less affordable for decades, and a lot of bright STEM graduates that made software/CPU development/Hi-tech happen might have taken cushy, tax-payer funded jobs instead...
