Do you know where the factory jobs politicians keep announcing are actually landing?

Not in the towns that lost them. Not in Martinsville, Virginia, or Galesburg, Illinois, or any of the other places that watched textile mills and assembly plants close their doors over the past three decades. A 2023 Brookings Institution analysis found that roughly 75% of reshored manufacturing investment flows into suburban metro areas, not into the rural communities that spent years being told globalization was temporary. The jobs went overseas quietly. They are coming back loudly. And they are coming back somewhere else entirely.

I dug into the actual research so you do not have to — here is what I found. And it is not a comfortable story for anyone who has been cheering these announcements.

Why the Myth Exists

Reshoring sounds like justice. After decades of watching American factories close and American workers retrain for jobs that never quite materialized, the idea that manufacturing is coming home carries enormous emotional weight. Politicians love announcing it. Ribbon cuttings photograph well. The press releases write themselves.

Nobody audits this. That is the problem.

The Economic Policy Institute estimated in 2022 that the United States lost 3.7 million manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2018, with rural counties absorbing a disproportionate share of those losses. When companies began announcing reshored operations after 2020, supply chain disruptions and new federal incentives made it genuinely attractive to produce domestically again. The CHIPS and Science Act alone authorized $52.7 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The Inflation Reduction Act layered another $369 billion in clean energy manufacturing incentives on top of that.

Think of it this way: imagine your neighborhood lost its grocery store, then someone announced a new one was opening — three towns over, accessible only by highway, with no bus route connecting you to it. The announcement sounds good. The reality helps someone else.

Reality Check: Before celebrating a reshoring announcement, search the company name on Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker at goodjobsfirst.org. You will almost always find the public cost per job is never mentioned in the press release. A single semiconductor facility can cost taxpayers more than $500,000 per job created — a number companies are not eager to publicize.

The Cost Nobody Is Publishing

The real story behind the headlines is that reshoring is extraordinarily expensive, and a significant share of that cost is being borne by the public. A 2023 report from the National Association of Manufacturers put the total cost of producing goods domestically at 19% higher than equivalent offshore production, even after accounting for shipping and tariffs. That gap has not closed the way optimists projected.

Automation is the reason. Modern reshored facilities are not the labor-intensive operations that once employed thousands of workers per plant. A semiconductor fab or an EV battery plant is designed to run lean, with robotics and process automation doing work that human hands once did. Intel’s planned Ohio campus, which received $19.5 billion in combined federal and state support, was projected to employ approximately 3,000 people directly. That is a thin employment return for one of the largest manufacturing investments in American history.

Ask yourself why they do not advertise this part.

Did You Know? According to a 2022 MIT Technology Review analysis, the average new domestic manufacturing facility requires 47% fewer workers per unit of output than its 1990 equivalent. Reshoring jobs is not the same thing as restoring the workforce that globalization displaced.

The gap between announcement and reality is where rural communities keep getting hurt. Counties under 50,000 people lack the infrastructure, the workforce training pipeline, and the political leverage to compete for these investments. A suburban metro near a major research university can offer a tech company proximity to engineers, an airport, and a supply chain ecosystem. A former textile town in the Piedmont cannot offer those things yet. So the subsidies flow toward places that were already doing relatively well.

Martinsville, Virginia: A Case Study in Being Left Behind

Martinsville sits in the southern Virginia foothills, a city of about 13,000 people that once produced more furniture per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Patrick County and Henry County around it were manufacturing communities in the truest sense. The city has a workforce that knows how to make things. The old DuPont plant on Commonwealth Boulevard has been empty for eleven years. Mayor Clarence Martin told the Martinsville Bulletin in 2022 that the city had pursued more than a dozen manufacturing prospects in the previous three years and landed none of them — because competing incentive packages from larger metros were simply out of reach for a city operating on a limited tax base.

Martinsville is not an outlier. The Economic Innovation Group’s 2023 Distressed Communities Index identified 35 million Americans living in economically distressed zip codes, most of them rural, and found that reshoring investment had largely bypassed those communities in the post-pandemic period.

Who Actually Benefits

The beneficiaries of reshoring, as currently structured, are a fairly specific group: large corporations receiving substantial public subsidies, suburban metro areas with existing infrastructure advantages, and workers who already have technical credentials. The workers who do not benefit are the ones politicians most often invoke when making reshoring announcements.

Convenient, right?

This is not an argument against domestic manufacturing. Reducing dependence on single-source foreign supply chains is a legitimate national security concern, and the COVID-19 pandemic exposed genuine vulnerabilities in American procurement. But the policy as designed is not solving the problem it claims to be solving. It is routing public investment toward private actors in favorable locations while rural communities that bore the original cost of deindustrialization continue to wait.

Here is what this actually means for you: if you live in a rural county and you hear your congressman announce a reshoring win, look at where the plant is going before you celebrate. The announcement may be real. The benefit to your community may not be.

Warning: State economic development offices often count a reshored facility as a rural win even when it lands in a suburban county adjacent to a rural region. “Rural-adjacent” is not rural. Check the actual county population before accepting a jobs announcement at face value.

The pattern also has a quiet fiscal cost that rarely gets discussed. Many reshoring incentives take the form of tax abatements, meaning the new facilities pay reduced or zero property taxes for a decade or more. Rural school districts that desperately need tax revenue get a facility nearby but not the funding that facility would otherwise generate. They absorb the infrastructure costs — road upgrades, utility extensions, water and sewer capacity — while the tax benefit is deferred or eliminated entirely.

This dynamic mirrors something I wrote about recently in the context of return offers costing workers far more than they realize. The headline number sounds positive. The structure underneath it works against the people it appears to help.

Manufacturing policy that genuinely serves displaced communities would look different. It would prioritize greenfield investment in distressed zip codes. It would tie subsidy eligibility to workforce pipelines that draw from local populations, not imported technical talent. It would measure success by median wage growth in the host county, not by the number of ribbon cuttings.

That policy does not yet exist at scale. And until it does, bringing manufacturing home will keep costing more than outsourcing did — in public dollars, in rural opportunity, and in the distance between the announcement and the people who needed it most.

Your Next 3 Steps

Step 1. Look up your county’s actual reshoring investment on the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker at goodjobsfirst.org before believing any politician’s announcement. Search by company name or by state. The per-job subsidy figure is almost always buried or absent from official press releases — find it yourself.

Step 2. Cross-reference any factory job announcement in your region with the Brookings Metro Monitor at brookings.edu to see whether it is landing in a rural county or a suburban MSA. If the facility is in a metro statistical area with a population over 500,000, it is not a rural recovery story, regardless of how it gets framed.

Step 3. Contact your state economic development office directly and ask one specific question: what reshoring incentives, if any, are explicitly targeting counties under 50,000 people? If they cannot name a program, you have your answer about whose recovery this actually is.