You can have manufacturing in the US. High industry automation is the key. There's a cost to having everything we use made on the other side of the planet. If you can build a plant in the US with far fewer employees than an heavily "manual" plant in China you could be competitive. Who wants Foxconn plants in the US? We don't need to bump up our suicide rate or increase the number of poor workers in this country: the future of manufacturing in the US is not the Ford plant from the early 1900s, it's a modern plant employing few but skilled and well paid operators of complex machinery who can support a family and their community. Beyond employment, it's important for the industrial fabric of this country to keep manufacturing technology at home and not create a huge dependency on the rest of the world (especially on a single country). Whether in manufacturing or in agriculture, there's a quest for cheap labor rather than for mechanization. In the first case, jobs are moved abroad and in the latter case, cheaper labor is brought in, often illegally. For sure, we need design: whether S/W, H/W, robotics... H1-Bs help: H1-B are very well paid. I work in a high-tech company with many foreigners, most from Asia. I'm myself an immigrant, had once an H-1B and the bottom line is that H1-B are used to fill very well paid (well advertised) positions. I interview candidates for open positions and I can say that I rarely see resumes from US citizens. If it's hard to find employees in a location, salaries rocket up and sooner than later, companies just move somewhere else: more H1-B would keep high-tech salaries more in line with the world reality (and keep local cost of living more reasonable) and would actually help keep jobs in this country. Plus H1-Bs are a source of skilled immigrant and therefore of job creation... In terms of federal policy: better education (specially elementary->high school), support for fundamental research, possibly subsidies for industrial equipment would help.

What about UWB?
It does not intefere with 802.11g and targets a -minimum- of 100 Mbit/s at 10m and USB2 like rates within a short distance. I've read about chips that achieve 100 Mbit/s at 20m and that are already sampled.