American statists simply resort to backdoor controls on American manufacturing via unions, EPA and other regulations.
After all, manufacturing is one of those industrial niches where no one has been successful on their own. Therefore, everyone is complicit. In order to avoid coerced, second-hand complicity, statists go all out to destroy evil, polluting, free-riding manufacturing.
Private sector unions are on their death bed. Privates sector union participation rate is 6.5% and falling. The manufacturing job you export to a slave kingdom has a 93% chance of making a non union fellow American worker unemployed.
They sound a lot like the teachers who made everyone stay after class when one of the kids pulls something. Such teachers, after all, insisted that said policy was for the children['s own good].
How that type got in charge, I don't know.