There is a point in just-in-time manufacturing where the physical distance becomes important. It still takes around 3 weeks for a physical good to leave a Chinese factory and arrive at a US distribution center.
At the moment that's skilled work and a small number of US workers will gain at the cost of a bunch of low-paid workers in poor countries. But it won't be long before that work becomes semi-skilled (see also sub-contract electronic engineering) and is done in Poland / China / where ever, for less than it can be done in the US.
Importation from China is not free, but I can still buy a human-made t-shirt imported from China for a couple of dollars.
If we can use robotics to mass assemble something as complex as a couple nanometer billion transistor chip, we can most definitely bring that to garments with some effort and scale it.
Intel can pump out a billion processors with probably a fraction of the employee count they have now (they have 100k total, but they're not all needed to just produce processors). That's intense efficiency.
Obviously the Intel example is a fairly ideal robotic manufacturing scenario. But the point is, that kind of ability will expand outward to all aspects of manufacturing as robotics leaps forward.
China already has a massive supply of human labor, which is primarily why their labor costs are so low. If you were to automate their labor, it would cause substantial unemployment and or reductions in pay. I'd argue their society couldn't withstand that shock at this point. In the extremely near future, China's huge supply of labor is going to rupture their economy rather than being a net benefit. The robot productivity wave in manufacturing over the next quarter century will be extremely painful for them.
Whereas if the US re-acquires 50,000 jobs from robotics related to making garments (commodities & materials (farming, cotton), shipping, R&D, assembly of robots, maintenance of robots, etc etc) it's a massive win. Also, it would mean keeping wealth / capital in the US market, rather than sending it to another nation to the benefit of their future and labor pool. Then instead of buying a shirt made in China from Walmart, you buy the same shirt at Walmart and all the money stays domestically.
There's no winning scenario for China from robotic manufacturing.
This is a good point. Although I would argue that yes America would reacquire the garment industry some what, however the parts that make the machine up will still be manufactured by overseas competitors.
I think they are on the right track but the problem still lies in manufacturing chips and metal pieces cost substantially less overseas.
The US isn't going to go back to holding 55% of global manufacturing again. There's zero chance of that happening. What part of that are you refuting?
I am cynical, so I'm going to guess the second. Even if we get mass robot manufacturing, we'll just let China continue to build all sorts of stuff, cause it's easier to pollute there.