Yes, excellent point Todd. I also happen to like Acteryx and own some of their closing. Looked at where my jacket was mfg. - Bangladesh.
Or look at Winchester. Hard to think of a more American company. Except Winchester firearms are mfg. under license by FN Herstal a Belgian company. As you point out some "American" companies are owned by or subsidiaries of foreign companies. And certainly the ownership of U.S. publicly traded companies is not restricted to U.S. citizens, just as Americans own shares of foreign companies. Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. offer funds that specifically invest in foreign companies.
I own a BMX X5 that I understand was mfg. in Spartanburg South Carolina. Your Ford F150 may have been made in Mexico. Both cars probably use imported steel and chips that came from China. So I guess my BMW is an American car and your Ford is a Mexican car.
To bring this discussion back to optics, Steiner is a German company, but many of its scopes are made in Greeley, CO.
Finally, there is some ambiguity about what "made in America" even means. my understanding is that some companies whose scopes are "made in America" may assemble their scopes in the U.S., but many of the parts may have been mfg. in China and the glass may come from a factory in Japan.
To use another example - being able to advertise your watch as a Swiss watch, made in Switzerland or having a Swiss movement generally carries a lot of prestige in the watch world. However, a watch may be advertised as being made in Switzerland even if 49% of its parts were made elsewhere, so long as the watch is assembled in Switzerland.
Bottom line, the globalization of our economy has already occurred and the manufacturing and trade relationship between the U.S. and other countries is a lot more complicated than people think.
