[jyl]

But in China, the electronics assembly jobs at Foxconn are the most desirable sort of manufacturing jobs. They attract the cream of the crop of unskilled/less educated but still bright, energetic, ambitious young people from the inland rural areas, who compete to get those jobs. The wages are considered good, compared to what they can make at home. They move into the Foxconn dormitories, work very hard, after four or five years they can save up enough to go back to their villages and start a business or something. It is a genuine career move.

(At least, this is the way it was when I was last at a Foxconn facility, several years ago. Maybe the economics have changed.)

If you moved Foxconn to the US, to make the economics work out even barely, the wages would have to be awful, poverty-level pay - for work that is actually pretty demanding. If you could get anyone to do the work, it would be the dregs of the labor force - to put it bluntly. I don't think that is a moral indictment of the American labor force, just reality. Offer minimum wage for intense, high-concentration, quite exacting assembly work? You'll get people who can't find any other employment - i.e. the dregs. That isn't a recipe for quality products.