Detroit is a real place but also a mythical one. It’s a city that lives in the American imagination as a symbol of the nation’s manufacturing prowess. The name “Detroit” serves as a kind of cultural shorthand — so when President Donald Trump, speaking recently about American automakers making cars in Canada, said, “I’d rather make them in Detroit,” he might have been speaking literally or he might have been speaking metaphorically.
For his purposes, he might be just as happy to see those cars built in the actual Detroit, or somewhere else in the United States — both would satisfy his goal of reshoring American manufacturing jobs.
Or would it? In an interview with CNN, Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, described the goal of Trump’s tariffs on imports this way: “The end game here for the auto industry is to fill up the half-empty factories that now are operating at low capacities around Detroit and the general Midwest area.”
Maybe Navarro is speaking symbolically, too, but he sure sounds a lot more specific, and he’s not wrong: The Rust Belt is called the Rust Belt for a reason. There are also sound political reasons for any president to be concerned about those states: Michigan and Wisconsin are swing states that elected Trump in 2016, tilted to Joe Biden in 2020, then back to Trump in 2024. Ohio used to be a swing state but has since drifted into more reliably Republican territory.
However, even if Trump succeeds in his overall goal of increasing American manufacturing jobs (a debatable proposition for reasons I discussed in a previous column), he could still fall short of the goal of filling up “the half-empty factories” in the industrial Midwest.
Why? Because that’s not where the growth in automaking jobs is taking place, nor is that where the growth in manufacturing jobs in general is taking place. Both those trends could change, of course, but the general trendlines show that when automakers add jobs in the United States, they’re doing it in the Sun Belt, not the Rust Belt — and that overall, the biggest growth in manufacturing jobs is likewise in the Sun Belt.
Michigan remains the state with the most automaking jobs, but it now only accounts for 15% of the national total, according to Visual Capitalist. Of the 10 states with the most automaking-related jobs, employment is shrinking in all but two — Alabama, where it’s growing, and Missouri, where it’s flat.
The reason why automaking jobs have moved out of the Midwest and into the Sun Belt is no secret: Industrial jobs of all kinds have tended to move either overseas or to states where unions are weaker and wages are lower. That suggests if Trump is successful in getting some automaking jobs reshored, those jobs are more likely to go to Sun Belt states, not those “half-empty factories” around Detroit. Indeed, Volkswagen is looking at moving some Audi production to the United States but is eyeing sites in South Carolina and Tennessee, according to Automotive News.
To the extent that his broader goal is to boost manufacturing of all kinds, not just automaking jobs, the same trend applies: The biggest growth in manufacturing jobs is taking place in the Sun Belt, not the Rust Belt. And not all of the Sun Belt, either. The Economic Innovation Group reports that two-thirds of the nation’s manufacturing growth is now taking place in just five states: Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Utah, in that order.
Regular readers of this column know that I often write about demography and point out that even in places with little or no population change, there may be dramatic changes beneath the surface in certain categories. The same is true here: Manufacturing jobs in the United States bottomed out in February 2010 during Barack Obama’s first term as the nation came out of the Great Recession. They grew slowly after that and have been generally flat from December 2018 during Trump’s first term until today (with the exception of the pandemic, of course). We’ve now had three presidents over five terms who have found it difficult to grow the number of manufacturing jobs.
However, beneath that relatively meager growth, we see some dramatic changes, some up, some down, in different parts of the country.
Since 2019, we’ve seen manufacturing jobs decline in the traditional industrial heartland of the Northeast and Great Lakes region, with the steepest percentage decline coming in Vermont at -5%. However, some Sun Belt states have seen explosive growth in manufacturing, on both a percentage basis and a raw number basis.
If we drill down further and look at metro areas, the fastest growth in manufacturing jobs over the past five years has been in San Antonio — with a phenomenal 23.7% growth in manufacturing jobs. Salt Lake City has come in second at 12.1%. Why those cities? For one thing, that’s where population growth is happening, which gives potential employers a larger labor pool to draw from. Both also benefit from something Southwest Virginia doesn’t have: a lot of relatively flat land ready for development.
Now, percentages can be misleading, especially if they’re coming off a small base, so let’s look instead at actual numbers.
Since 2019, the five states creating the most manufacturing jobs are all in the Sun Belt, while four of the five losing the most have been in the Rust Belt.
States with most new manufacturing jobs Number of jobs Percentage increase Texas 49,450 5.5% Florida 36,986 9.6% Georgia 20,303 5.0% Arizona 16,797 9.5% Utah 15,990 11.8% States losing the most manufacturing jobs Number of jobs Percentage increase Wisconsin −8,759 −1.8% Michigan −12,449 −2.0% Ohio −13,441 −1.9% New York −18,341 −4.2% Washington −19,351 −6.7%
Based on those numbers, Texas is the new Michigan and San Antonio is the new Detroit.
If we look at the total number of manufacturing jobs, California has the most, followed by Texas.
Those are big states, so everything is bigger there. What makes the Rust Belt states stand out is that a) they still have a lot of manufacturing jobs (Ohio ranks third, Illinois fourth, Michigan fifth), but also b) they have the highest concentration of manufacturing jobs, although Alabama has been closing in fast. In Indiana, 16% of the jobs are in manufacturing, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, the highest in the nation, but Alabama is now at 13.0%, which makes it more industrialized than Ohio (12.3%) and just behind Michigan (13.2%).
Furthermore, future growth in manufacturing is likely to bypass those traditional manufacturing states. Site Selection Group, an international company that advises companies seeking new locations, recently published its “best states for manufacturing.” Those recommendations focused heavily on the Southeast, with North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee ranked 1-2-3.
Virginia ranked sixth. This is where we start to bring all this home.
If there is growth in manufacturing — be it from reshoring or other reasons — what are the odds that some of that will be in Virginia?
That’s a difficult question to answer. Those site selection companies often have more than 100 data points on their checklist. Much of the answer may be what types of manufacturing jobs are being created and how they fit into the overall business ecosystem. Industries tend to cluster. We’ve seen states from Georgia to North Carolina become part of a growing “battery belt” of battery manufacturers. Virginia hasn’t become part of that, but would with the planned Microporous plant in Pittsylvania County. My home county of Botetourt County has seen growth in companies making cooling systems for data centers, a consequence of Northern Virginia being a hub for the data center industry.
In general, Virginia is not a manufacturing state. The National Association of Manufacturers says Virginia ranks 40th nationwide, with just 5.7% of its jobs in manufacturing.
However, in most rural areas, manufacturing is the top employment sector, and some parts of Virginia — primarily Southwest and Southside — do have a particularly high concentration of manufacturing jobs. These are the localities that potentially have the most to gain if Trump’s tariffs succeed, but also the most to lose if they lead to permanent disruptions in international trade that reduce American market share.
The larger point here, though, is that the geography of American manufacturing is changing. It’s been changing for a long time, of course. However, we should not assume that because yesterday’s manufacturing jobs were in, say, Detroit, that tomorrow’s will be — when all the evidence shows they might be more likely to land somewhere else. Likewise, no one in some small town in Virginia should assume that because it was once a manufacturing town, those jobs are coming back. Different manufacturing jobs might, but only if those localities lay the groundwork for them. Over the past 10 years, four of the six biggest manufacturing announcements in the state have gone to the urban crescent, not rural Virginia, according to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership. And of those other two — the Blue Star medical glove plant in Wythe County and the Microporous battery plant in Pittsylvania County — neither has happened yet.