All of which brings things full circle in the South. Billy Joe Camp thinks the South's well-distributed expertise in the aerospace industry dovetails nicely with the automotive sector's needs as well, pointing to such communities as Pensacola, Fla., and Mobile and Huntsville, Ala., where Toyota is revving up a new V-8 engine plant. Asked about whether some of the displaced auto workers in the North might be more tempted than ever to relocate, Camp says that's a sensitive issue for states to consider, but the fact remains that wherever autoworkers go, they're productive citizens. He also identifies another full circle pattern.
      "I grew up in a very rural north Alabama area in the 1950s," he says, "and I remember a good number of our neighbors were getting together the bus fare to go to Detroit and Chicago to find jobs in the automotive sector. So we had a lot of Southerners go up there for jobs, and the reverse might not be so bad either. It's a very important sector of the economy, not just for the Southeast, but for the nation. We have a long way to go to have as much as Detroit or Ontario. We're not going to recruit everything away from those other areas -- we want to work with them."
      Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America's Jim Wiseman echoes that sentiment in describing the operations of the company's supplier support center at its Erlanger, Ky., headquarters. A sense of reciprocity motivates Toyota to send personnel to suppliers free of charge in order to help those that use the Toyota production system to do it better.
      "That's a commitment we made to the auto industry in the U.S.," says Wiseman. "As we were getting going in the 1950s in Japan, we were welcomed by Ford and other auto makers, and we feel an obligation to give back now. We're big believers in the value of manufacturing, how it's maybe the leading aspect of any nation's economy," he concludes. "It's a big deal to us to help bolster manufacturing here."