Wrong. If we cut the legal and illegal immigration, there will be more jobs for the current freeloaders.
Plus an abundance of cheaper domestic labor will spur more innovation and entrepreneurship. Welfare creates a “floor” which wages cannot go below, because people will simply take the free sh!t rather than work for less. If somebody can start up a company with people willing to work for lower labor costs than they are currently, you’ll get more start-ups, which will create more growth and jobs and higher wages over time if they’re successful.
Happiness is not defined by goods and things alone. The difference between a manufactured good and a service is often kind of arbitrary. Is paying for a massage or buying a massage chair all that different in terms of what you get? Is a manufactured book different from a digital book you download online? We can start a lot of businesses outside of manufacturing that people will be happy to pay for. We don’t need manufacturing as some sort of “special snowflake,” protected form of production.
If we are short on jobs now, it’s not because we need “manufacturing” necessarily. It means we just need more innovation in whatever form it comes. And innovating something new is always better than trying to cling to the same thing you did in the past. To spur on innovation we need to expand free markets in education (school choice), decrease regulations, decrease taxes, and cut off the free sh!t so that people are actually motivated to get out and work.
Of course out-of-control immigration and little immigration law enforcement is part of it. But very complex problems like our unemployment and trillion in annual poverty program payouts have more than one cause, and usually several causes. And the loss of thousands of factories and millions of manufacturing jobs is definitely a major part of it, if not the major part.