I think you are a damned fool. We cant and wont fully surrender our industrial base to communist china.
Do you believe in capitalism?
Or are you a nationalistic socialist?
The "China Price" is the best price for manufacturing. The "India Price" is the best price for engineering and programming and tech stuff.
Companies today are not "American" or "European". They are global. Shareholders from around the globe own shares.
Capitalism is about maximizing economic return to shareholders. In manufacturing, that means finding the cheapest inputs to the manufacturing process and selling the finished goods at the highest price. Labor is a commodity, an input to production. The cheapest labor is in China and India. Ergo, the profit maximizing strategy is to transfer all manufacturing to China and India. Truth is, if one combines industrial America with industrial Western Europe, one still only comes up with a bit over a half-billion people TOTAL. China and India, between them, have almost two billion peasants in utter poverty. So, even if the whole manufacturing base of Europe and America are transferred to India and China, there is such a huge glut of cheap human labor that the price of labor will not be significantly driven up over there. There is that much excess. That makes it easy to discipline labor in those countries as well, because there is no labor protection, and any laborer who causes the slightest bit of trouble (like wanting to take a day off work to tend to his sick children, for instance, or any laborer who gets cancer, stuff like that) can be thrown away and three others will take his place. This is a manufacturers paradise, because labor is cheap and utterly replaceable, so labor CAN'T start to force up costs, especially in China, where the government will systematically prevent the formation of any organized body of people. China's Communist government acts as a clamp on top of the aspirations of labor, preventing unionization and offering the promise of a century or more of "The China Price". The profits from dirt cheap, or free!, labor, are substantial enough to build a very wealthy capitalist society! (For proof, look at how gorgeous Charleston, Savannah, Monticello and Mount Vernon are!)
Why should shareholders from around the world have their profits reduced in the companies they invest in because a bunch of American or European laborers, who contribute nothing but an utterly replaceable commodity, want to keep grossly overpaid jobs? It is bad business!
Now, of course, if one is a nationalist and believes that Americans (or Frenchmen) are somehow MORE IMPORTANT than Chinese or Indians, then one can start making economically foolish decisions like choosing to protect American (or French) laborers from the foreign competition. An American costs five times as much as a Chinese to do the same manufacturing job, and he doesn't do it any better, but some folks have these emotional attachments to what they know, their own countries. It's all misty eyed and sweet, but it's pure socialism to use the law to prevent capitalists - the ones with the capital to invest with the express purpose of maximizing profit - from investing in lean, cheap Chinese and Indian labor in order to keep fat, lazy Americans working at jobs that by all economic reasoning OUGHT to be done by Chinese and Indians.
What are you, some sort of SOCIALIST?
Protectionism is socialism. It's nationalistic socialism.
So, that's what we come down to: efficient, clean, aggressive profit-maximizing capitalism - the good old fashioned American kind that built America up from its roots in the Virginia plantations - versus this national socialism of yours that wants to protect a mere commodity (American labor) from its more efficient competitor abroad (I assume you don't give a damn about French labor, that you resent the FRENCH protecting their labor as socialism, and that you take delight in seeing "socialist" French labor get laid off, so I am just focusing on expensive American manufacturing labor, which, thanks to globalization, has lost its economic right to continue to exist.)
Capitalism is survival of the fittest. The fittest companies get the hell out of America and Europe and manufacture or net-engineer everything where labor is dirt cheap.
You want to protect "the American manufacturing base", you national socialist you.
Fortunately for the shareholders of international companies, there are enough hard-driving MBA's out there who understand that profit maximization is found in using Chinese and Indian labor. The companies that get all of their manufacturing out of America and Europe first are the ones that will rule the 21st Century. Quaint old national socialism can only fight a rearguard action against intelligent capitalism.
Another Look at Outsourcing (Vanity)
Whither the Economy?(Vanity)
(Vanity) A Falling Tide Grounds All Boats
(Vanity) The New Colonialism, or, Out of One, Many
(Vanity) Immigration Policies, or, Half-A-Glass
(Vanity) As the World Turns, or The Wild, Wild, East
(Vanity) As the World Turns, Part II, or Back to the Future
(Vanity) As the World Turns, Part III, or, The Year of Lipstick on a Pig
(Vanity) As the World Turns, Part IV, or The New Dealhi
Cheers!