Jobs at risk from isolationism
Tech executives, including HP's chief executive Meg Whitman, herself a Republican candidate for California Governor in 2010, offered some bleak assessments of Trump's plans to, for example, add a 35 percent tariff on imported goods, noting that this "would sink this country into a recession. It would penalize global companies that are trying to be competitive globally."
Trump certainly gained some populist support by suggesting he would seek to induce companies like Apple to bring manufacturing jobs to the United States, as well as place caps on H-1B visas that many tech companies use to bring in skilled foreign workers.
However, Apple has already attempted to create manufacturing jobs domestically, ranging from sourcing materials for its Mac Pro from American firms to obtaining iPhone screens and certain silicon components from domestic factories. Trump's plan to add a 35 percent tariff on imported goods "would sink this country into a recession," - Meg Whitman
The problem with bringing Shenzhen-style mass manufacturing to the United States is that America lacks the vast supply chain infrastructure and specialized tool and die experts that China has cultivated for decades.
Further, American workers are largely not interested in working out of dorms in the massive manufacturing plants required to build tens of millions of devices on tight schedules to support Apple's blockbuster product launches.
Instead, Apple has focused on creating app economy jobs in the U.S., investing in efforts to build an App Store marketplace and Xcode developer tools to support entrepreneurial software creation. Apple has paid out billions of dollars to domestic developers, creating high quality employment for modern knowledge workers.
The rapid, large scale investment in the iOS App ecosystem has resulted in high paying jobs that attract talent to tech centers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley (including Facebook and Twitter), as well as spreading to other expanding tech scenes in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, Boston, New York, Washington DC, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Miami and other cities around the country.
By introducing caps on visas, rapidly growing tech companies in the U.S. will find it more difficult to bring in talent acquihired elsewhere, making it more attractive for companies like Apple to simply expand their overseas operations.
Apple has already stepped up its efforts to build international development and research campuses, including facilities based in Ottawa, Canada; Cambridge, England; Herzliya, Israel; Bengaluru, India, Shanghai, China; Yokohama, Japan and many other sites.
While perfect for exciting crowds, Trump's proposed protectionist policies would interfere with America's emerging markets related to app development and new technologies ranging from virtual reality to augmented reality and self-driving vehicles, with the likely unintended consequence of moving more valuable employment overseas, keeping tax-paying visa workers employed in foreign countries where they wouldn't contribute anything to America's tax base.
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