Sure, I think that would be reasonable. I have two points though. Someone else doesn't have to do the right thing for us to do it. While it would be better if other countries reciprocated, it doesn't have to stop us from doing the right thing. Secondly, from a practical point of view the demand for people to emmigrate from the US and work in a country with lower wages is not nearly as high as the demand the other way.
With the high number of jobs being offshored and outsourced I would not be surprised if many Americans would gladly leave to increase their job prospects. It may be the case that people in the United States can no longer sustain a living here due to the high cost of living. Perhaps we will reach that point.
The United States had a very high employment rate leading up to the covid crisis. Lower than it had been during the 90s, but that was an anonymously propserous decade: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:.... It stood at roughly 62%.
According to the same website India's current employment rate is ~50% (part of this likely due to gender imbalances) and you can bet that wages are much lower. The relevant metric is purchasing power parity adjusted household median income. It's roughly 50 times higher in the United States than in say India (less so for China and Russia).
I don't understand how you can see countries like China or India as presenting more opportunity with local wages. There are of course cultural reasons to want to move there, but I don't think there's any reasonable case that there's more economic opportunity. Some things will be cheaper for sure (rent and labor, namely) but consumer goods, food, electricity, and the like, will not be commensurately cheaper wrt the drop in income.
Yes, but having a job and staying in the middle class in any country is much better than entering a lower class after your position has been either eliminated, outsourced, or off-shored and you cannot find another.
However, maybe there is an argument that the middle class in a different country is worse off in terms of purchasing power than the lower American class. I'm not sure if that is the case, but either way it would be better to be gainfully employed in an industry of a person's choosing than to be lower class in an industry a person does not want to work in.
The threat of this happening in America, as I perceive it anecdotally, is much more real than the statistics suggest. I could see a scenario where only the top 20% of skilled professionals in major industries survive in the United States, while the demand for the bottom 80% is met by outsourced or off-shored professionals.
