The reshoring wave is rebuilding factories in Phoenix and Dallas. Inland Empire manufacturing just shrank 4 percent.

The national story is a manufacturing homecoming. The Reshoring Initiative counts more than 244,000 factory jobs announced in 2024, and site-selection coverage this year puts the action in Phoenix, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Salt Lake City, where semiconductor, EV, and advanced-materials projects compete for clean-room space and controls engineers. Nearly nine in ten of those announced jobs are classed as high-tech.

EDD data tells the Inland Empire a different story. Manufacturing here shed 3,900 jobs over the year through May, a 4.1 percent drop and the region's steepest goods-sector loss after construction. Durable and non-durable plants fell at nearly the same rate. The factory base the region already has is eroding while the new build-out goes elsewhere.

The reason is structural. The reshoring wave wants reliable low-cost electricity and a deep engineering bench — the two things the Sun Belt interior markets are selling and the two things the IE, with California power costs and a workforce built around distribution, does not lead on. The region's competitive pitch was always land and port access. That pitch wins warehouses, not chip fabs.

And warehousing is, in fact, holding. Transportation and warehousing employment was essentially flat over the year, down a tenth of a percent, with warehousing and storage actually up 2.6 percent to 124,400 jobs. The softness sits in the margins — couriers down 11.2 percent, general freight trucking down 3.8 percent — not in the core. The IE's imported-goods economy is steady. What it is not doing is converting into a domestic-production economy.

For operators, the read is that the tariff era is not a manufacturing tailwind for this region. The same trade pressure that's filling order books in Arizona raises input costs for IE producers without delivering the offsetting reshoring investment. Manfred Keil, the IEEP's chief economist, has warned that weaker port trade under tariffs threatens the logistics base; the factory numbers suggest the production side isn't waiting in the wings to replace it.