[seanmcdirmid]

Japan is actually the anti-thesis of your argument. They move young Japanese kids to Thailand to work call service jobs (they can pay them less there). They went through a huge automation push in the 80s/early 90s because they could n't find enough people to work in their factories, and this only went away in the late 90s when China came online with cheaper labor. Heck, it is ironic that the automation that we associate with China today is exactly what we associated with Japan in until the 00s! Now Japan is kind of messed up: kids are not finding it easy to deal with jobs whose salaries aren't rising (or their company sends them to work in Thailand).

We are already there, heck, China knows they will be there soon. Japan is definitely having issues with kids not wanting to work for peanuts anymore (so offering them an adventure in Bangkok). With the US on its current Trump-inspired anti-intellectualism kick, it is very likely that we will be buying automation equipment from China 10 or so years from now to do deal with coming labor shortages (assuming we don't just try to fix it with immigration again).