“And there could be a lot of persons like person B coming in, in the next decade or two.” (meaning foreign visa holders).
It already has happened, I have had openings in my group (IT based), and resumes we see are mostly Indian, some from Eastern Europe, some from the rest of southeast Asia, and China with a handful of people born in the US. Most of them got here on the H1b visa (many of them still were), and they worked for the outsourcing consulting firms, or places like Accenture. These aren’t people with special skills, many of the schools they came from are basically glorified trade schools (I am not talking a place like IIT, which is a top tier school), but the H1B has allowed them to come into the US. And it was basically because they are low wage labor, what happened is very much a self fulfilling prophesy, corporations, claiming ‘shortages’, were allowed to change the H1B from being specialized skills (like a phd in solid state physics, where things are rare), to being for things like Java programming, DBA’s, QA, etc, and it drove down wages (Harvard Business Review, not exactly Mother Jones News, did a big study on it and said that most of the Visa hiring was for cheaper costs). Companies claimed these were highly skilled jobs, but they aren’t, many of those hired under this are drones, doing routine tasks, not talking rocket scientists. As a result, kids saw this, and realized they didn’t want to compete against third world labor prices, and went into other things, so the supply of US kids going into tech dropped, then we hear "shortages’, with the last immigration bill the Obama administration tried doubling the number of H1B visas allowed each year. I can tell you as a hiring manager that many of these wondering hands, after 7 or 8 years of experience, make a lot less than an experienced worker word and quite frankly, are probably worth what they cost, they have been relatively cheap labor to start and generally remain that way, and those running the groups are told to make do with what they get, rather than paying for more talented employees.
A lot of the outsourcing and the like is searching for cheap labor, basically what industry wants is to get labor as cheap as possible, and now that is global. Mills that were established in NE were to a large extend based on immigrant labor willing to work cheaply, as were the steel industry, once those industries unionized the mills moved down South to places that were non union and a lot cheaper in costs for them. When the east opened up, Mills started moving to Bengladesh, Thailand, India, and then into China, because labor costs were extremely low, and even with shipping costs, was a major cost reduction (it amazes me you buy something with a name label on it, like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and the rest, and it as made in some sweatshop in Bengladesh or the Phillipines). These days, because costs have gone up in China, the companies are opening factories in Vietnam (often moving in Chinese workers from rural areas at cheap wages), and into places like Africa.
Okay, so then why did the Japanese and Korean and European companies move their production to the US? The answer is that it was economically advantageous to do so, and it isn’t just labor costs (with BMW and Mercedes, it is, union workers in Germany make relatively high wages, plus the work rules are very stiff). The wages being paid in the transplants are not starvation wages, they might be less than what someone could have made in Detroit, but they are decent.One of the reasons is economic incentives that the regions give, with taxes. For the transplants down in Kentucky and Tennessee, they benefit from federal power from the TVA, that is sold at cost, and is about 50-65% cheaper than power from private power plants. The regions have good transportation, from truck and rail, so they can get supplies, and suppliers are located in the region as well (my Camry, made in Kentucky, was 80% sourced from parts in the US). The other thing it does is insulate them from currency fluctuations, if they build in the US, use parts from the US, currency fluctuations won’t make the cost skyrocket if the dollar goes weak. They also don’t have transportation costs and the bothers of tariffs, either.
The other reason is political, when you are an export only country, like Japan before they started moving production here, you get called what the Chinese are today, job stealers, exploiters of stupid US trade policy and the like. It also is the mindset of those running the companies, Toyota, Hyundai, BMW, VW, Honda and Nissan et al don’t think of themselves as ‘Japanese’ or “German” any more, they are global companies producing for local markets. Unlike China and India, these are developed countries who have internal economic demand that drives their economies, they don’t depend on exports and taking jobs from other countries to drive their economic growth (take a look at China, whose economy is spluttering, their answer was the devalue the Yuan, to make exports even cheaper; in a developed country they would be trying to do things to stimulate internal demand). One thing these companies realize is something that Henry Ford knew in the 1920’s (and was laughingly called a ‘socialist’ for it), that by locating in the US, they are building goods that the people on the assembly line can afford for the most part, those toyotas, hondas, Nissans and so forth are affordable (being luxury brands, BMW may not be, maybe the 3 series, MB probably not). The people on those lines can build their products and afford them, something you can’t say for a typical Indian and Chinese manufacturing worker, who can’t, few if any of the people assembling Apple products can afford them (they buy cheap knockoffs that flourish in China), those working on Chinese car company lines can’t afford them, the cars are sold to the middle class and upper classes, who usually have ties to the government or work for government de facto tied companies. Once upon a time Korea and Japan were low cost providers, but they also realized they needed to build up their own internal demand and they also needed to have demand in other countries, which taking jobs and giving them to low cost labor wouldn’t work in the long run.