[cloche]

> But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?

I live in the US and don't support the tariffs but I'll give my best shot at answering.

The US is fairly poorly educated on the whole. In order for people to survive, there need to be an abundance of low skilled jobs. AI and automation is threatening to remove these jobs. What are the poorly educated going to do? Decades ago, someone could work in a factory for their whole life. Yes it was monotonous work but it would provide a living and allow someone to buy a house and life their life. I know because my grandparents came over from Europe after WWII and did this. They spoke poor English but could work in a factory and have a house and a car and live a good life. That's not the case anymore. With further automation and the pace of change increasing, it worries a lot of these types of people. If you have no education and your factory closes, there are not many other options for you.

The idea isn't to bring just one manufacturing plant for snapping phones together. It's to bring many, many plants back to provide these jobs for the poorly educated. So instead of just having one plant in your town, you have several. That means there will be competition for workers and wages will rise.

That's the idea anyway. Do I think it's possible to rollback to that time? No, I don't. But this is what people, mainly in rural areas, want to hear.

Part of the problem is that the US doesn't want to invest in education as a whole. Education would be a better long-term solution. Instead, this leads to the visa situation where the US needs to import a lot of technically skilled workers rather than developing them locally.