In return, we import products made in foreign lands utilizing those feed-stocks.
All in all, we export labor costs. If somebody else in the world will do it cheaper than you can, the business will go to them. What those who are doing the exporting of labor don't realize, or don't really care, is that those foreign markets will at some point be able to steal their business right out from under them.
Look at this way. Apple produces their products in china, a communist regime. A regime that also does business with the rest of the world.
If they wanted to, they could literally take over apple's means of production, and make it their own, and apple would have no recourse whatsoever.
This is the precarious position that US business interests have put us in. The communist and socialist regimes that they deal with now have us by the balls.
Worth repeating!