Don't think the best and brightest are going to China anytime soon. And what is the tech in China for? Surveillance of those same smart scientists engineers?
The union can advocate for banning outsourcing. Having the basic functioning of large parts of your economy dependent on a foreign country is not a good idea! Someone living in an Indian slum can probably remember your social security number better than your wife can.
It's all controlled by the government so they should beat any private enterprise. They can order every engineer in the country to work for free to build a better widget, and lose money on every unit sold. But there is a downside...
Cash is printed infinitely, no one wants to hold it, so there are always buyers of anything and everything. $15 billion is pocket change, the US government was sending that much to inmates during COVID, maybe more, no one knows, the smallest unit that is accounted for is $1 trillion (soon to be quadrillion).
Unfortunately it will probably just be one more turn of the spiral downward. We can look forward to the government buying AI stocks with printed money, fixing prices and causing food shortages, probably yet another war, etc. Dumb corrupt people don't suddenly change their personalities. Maybe when a couple of generations are buried, but will there be anything left?
You have to be pretty naive to think that opening the border was done for the good of people because government loves you. There was no labor shortage, they just did it to increase profit for the people who bribed them. And the migrants are heavily subsidized by welfare, but it's on the tax/government debt ledger so it's not counted.
It helps when they make disastrous decisions. They're paying Elon like he is critical for the company's survival, which he was at the start, but at this stage he is probably more like a typical CEO who is a liability (though it's hard to know from the outside).
Or it can look like the replacement of telephone and elevator operators: there was not an explosion of new jobs. Over the past century there has been a huge expansion of government fake jobs, welfare, and debt funding more and more of the economy: horses could be the true technology of the future.