Good question.
The big tech companies for whom I have done extensive work over the years... outsource to save money... they say.
They get to hire people at a lower rate on a visa program, and from the time they start working here, after import, they are in constant FEAR of their lives.
Closest thing to the ‘indentured’ servant/ aka slave as I have ever met. They often have degrees, but cannot invent, adapt or create technology... and are under constant threat.
If you are making say, 65 g a year as a tech import, and you are from India... or China... or Japan... going home with no job, and scrapping to make 3 dollars a day, is not an option. When they come here and are married, the threat is their husband, wife, children, dissolution of their family upon discharge from the job and loss of everything humans care about.
And an upper middle class american who is worth his chops in technology trades can pull down close to 150 g - 200 g a year. at the big 10, senior level technologists have to also be paid benefits and bonuses. that bump that by an additional 20 percent.
So, what they do is bring in the 45-65 k a year indentured slave, to memorize the bulk of the innovator/implementor American worker/technologist for 8-12 mos and then fire the higher paid worker who developed the new 3d software, or the newest chip/motherboard configuration.
But the imports don’t always do as well as accounting and investment product line administrators expect. Product lines fail. Proprietary design and techno concepts are stolen, taken back to the country of origin and passed to the countries who tariff the hell out of our ‘original’ product, and scream bloody murder when the US threatens to tariff them equally, or manipulate the currency structure to offset the losses.
the idea sold to us as free trade carried with it the no hidden manipulation structure agreed to by member nations and companies.
Over time, the other countries skirt the agreement, and when we threaten to do likewise, the people getting rich around the world... scream, USA is threatening us with protectionism.
Why do companies and nations do that?
GREED, THEFT and CHEATING helps them stay afloat and build the nukes they want to kill us all with.
And the world trade people and their sycophants, buy parties, candidates, governments and organizing structures to keep the graft train rolling.
And although I have great hopes that Trump will terminate that whole structure... I doubt they will let him ever take office. I am concerned for his life, or the life of anyone who stands up to them. they own the republican party as the GOPe.. and they own the Hillary branch of the democrat party.
Bernie, commie that he is, would never get to take office either. Too damned nationalistic and a loose cannon.
I am worried about the jfk type of hit on Trump... and I suspect that Hillary is slated for health reasons to be dropped and replaced by Obama’s next right hand team.
We shall see.
That is a quick summary of what I have seen of outsourcing in the USA. Somebody get me a cheeseburger.
But where did the chip manufacturers go? The computer assembly plants? The tablet and smartphone manufacturing? The electronic component manufacturers?
Decades ago I recall seeing chips on circuit boards which were made in El Salvador, in the far East (but not Japan). Why go to a 3rd world country and set up microprocessor manufacturing facilities?
Well, 1-1-1 Trichloroethane (a solvent formerly used as dry cleaning fluid, but used to clean the silicon wafers as a step in manufacturing) is regulated off the domestic industrial landscape for the most part now. Other environmental and Health and safety regulations have pushed out manufacturing, mining (for rare earth elements), mineral processing and refining, and associated jobs, and pushed them to places where the rules are not as strident and huge savings can be had in making the hardware the software runs on. Those places aren't here.
While some regulation, or at least reasonable standards for exposures to potentially toxic materials are a good thing, when those standards are changed and made tougher just to, well, make the standards tougher, that imposes additional costs on business for compliance (equipment, PPE, process changes, facility upgrades, emissions controlls), and can turn profitable industries into fiscal losers.
I won't even mention 'Human Resources', which is something that crawled in in the last 20 years and all the snowflake reasons a company can be sued, nor product liability suits that mandate instruction booklets that tell the user not to use the hairdryer in the shower...to avoid suit.
The 'snowflake' reasons for a guy to lose his job are unreal, too.
So, they packed entire facilities up and went to a more friendly regulatory climate in areas where the rules would be more predictable, sometimes selling to a froeign supplier for pennies on the dollar to take the tax loss and avoid paying huge taxes on the sale.
Rapidly, a previously all-American company becomes multi-national or global, and the loyalties of the BOD tend to head in the same direction, to benefit the bottom line and the stockholders first (that is their job as they see it), all others after, and the Devil take the hindmost--all while facing demand for lower prices and the 'next big thing' from consumers.
We have met that monster, and it is us. Americans want what they buy to be of good quality, they want it fast, and they want it cheap, but ironically, they also want to be paid more money for what they do even as they want to pay less.
At the root of it all, are government agencies regulating everything going into and out of the building, and how it goes in and out, then taxing the crap out of the company for the privilege of being over regulated.
As Ronald Reagan said, "Government is not the solution, Government is the problem."