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However I do think that US companies will move existng jobs overseas if they can’t hire people locally.
***Here’s where we differ. I see US companies moving existing jobs overseas even if they CAN hire people locally.

Plus they will create new businesses outside the US.
***That can’t be good for the US.

It is simpler to manage local staff, but it is not necessary that they be local. Many professional jobs can now be performed from nearly anywhere in the world.
***Yup. Very few jobs are “safe”. That’s why kids are leaving engineering in droves. A couple of years ago, NASA was shipping rocket scientist jobs overseas. We are eating our own seed corn. But hey, we’re “competitive”. Did our founding fathers think that was important? I don’t find many documents where they discuss such things at length, but they seemed very concerned about freedoms and rights in our society... internationally competitive businesses didn’t seem all that high on their list of priorities.

However I do think that US companies will move existng jobs overseas if they can’t hire people locally.

***Here’s where we differ. I see US companies moving existing jobs overseas even if they CAN hire people locally.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and we therefore do not disagree. Companies will hire staff who provide a return on investment, wherever they are located. That's the nature of capitalism and that practice will grow human productivity more rapidly than hiring only domestic staff.

Plus they will create new businesses outside the US.

***That can’t be good for the US.

Well the opposite side of that same coin is that foreign companies hire US staff too. Also when US capital goes abroad to create new companies, that is good for both the investors in the US and the companies that receive that capital (presuming it generates a positive return). Most large capital projects in the early United States were funded almost entirely by foreign capital. That benefited both the investors and the United States.

It is simpler to manage local staff, but it is not necessary that they be local. Many professional jobs can now be performed from nearly anywhere in the world.

***Yup. Very few jobs are “safe”. That’s why kids are leaving engineering in droves. A couple of years ago, NASA was shipping rocket scientist jobs overseas. We are eating our own seed corn. But hey, we’re “competitive”. Did our founding fathers think that was important? I don’t find many documents where they discuss such things at length, but they seemed very concerned about freedoms and rights in our society... internationally competitive businesses didn’t seem all that high on their list of priorities.

I doubt that kids are leaving engineering in droves in the United States because their jobs are not "safe". I sat next to an engineer for AMD on a plane a couple days ago. He was taking his daughter to interview at UPenn, Princeton, MIT, and CMU. She was on the robotics team and was studying electrical engineering texts on the plane. Most kids were playing their GameBoys or listening their iPods. I suspect most kids in the US avoid engineering because it is a lot harder than "communications" or whatever else is the course of least resistance on the way to a B.A.

I don't think we are eating our corn seed. The analogy doesn't work at all. The corn hasn't even been planted or grown IMHO. Most kids in the US don't value hard work or education. I'm not sure I agree that the US is competitive in maths or the hard sciences compared to many other countries.

I don't know whether our founding fathers thought much about competitiveness. I would suggest that international trade was such a small part of GDP that competitiveness was not very important.

Internationally competitive business didn't seem very high on the list of priorities because it didn't really exist yet.

Incidentally, that guy on the plane was born in Taiwan and is now a US citizen. He's exactly the type person that cannot get into the US now. Had he stayed in Taiwan, he would be creating value there instead of here, as would his daughter one day soon...