He did indeed. He just could not find lines of good Americans signing up to spend long hours assembling iPhones at 3$ per hour. What a pity.
But the minimum wage in those Red States is $7.25 per hour. So $3 per hour is "out" in any case.
Funny thing is that "cheap labor" in China is about $6.50 per hour. That is a barely livable wage in China, but not too much different (75 cents) from the US Federal minimum wage.
The cost of living in rural Alabama is not much different from China. China is no longer the land of poor starving peasant farmers. People there live in high-rise apartment buildings and drive electric cars. Most of the people in China do NOT work in iPhone factories making $6.50. The normal income for a family of four is about $40K. Rent is between $600 and $1,200 per month. Of course, it varies very widely
Chinese universities graduate "hundreds of thousands of engineers every year, dramatically more than US universities do. These guys make good money. More than most Americans do.
The US, if you look only at the interior and ignore both the East and West Coasts, is dirt-poor. People there actually want Walmart jobs. Remember when "Candidate Trump" promised to put them back to work in coal mines, and they cheered? You have to be desperate to cheer when someone says they will send you into a coal mine.
The point is that no one goes to China for "cheap labor", we have that in Mississippi. They go there for the manufacturing expertise and deep supply chain, all done at a reasonable cost.
Another example of not-cheap labor is the Chinese Tesla factory. The cost to build a Tesla in China is not much different from the cost in Texas. Robots work for free in both places.