I have a friend who works for CooperTools in South Carolina. This is exactly what they are going through. Out of consideration for their employees, they are trying to send production overseas as slowly as possible. The engineers and machinists will be gone, but the accountants and salespeople will remain.
The problem that worries me the most is that these companies deal with metallurgy - forging, machining, heat treating, plating, etc. - many of which are pretty much "black arts". There is a lot of expertise which goes into the making of something as simple as a "Crescent" wrench - my friend has told me stories - and all that is going to be lost to America.
It's happening in every industry. I don't know what the answer is, but I fear for the future of America.
We're coming up on the anniversary of what I consider to be the peak of America's technological achievement - the landing of Americans on the moon. How low we've fallen in the intervening 34 years.
In another 34 years, american "industry" will consist of ragged people squatting in vacant parking lots selling trinkets that they made back in their huts. On their way home after dark, some of them old enough to remember might look up at the moon and think, "How did this happen to us?"
Chinese were very good in keeping their technology secrets. They managed for example to protect their lucrative silk industry for many centuries.
It's hard to tell what might have happened. If you look at this picture of Mission Control back in those days, it's hard to see any difference between then and now.