“Caterpillar to Shift Some Production to U.S.” That’s good news for American workers: 1,000 jobs are coming home from Japan. Some lucky state will win the lottery for the factory and become home base for global sourcing of Caterpillar’s small bulldozers and mini-hydraulic excavators. Interestingly, Caterpillar first developed these mini-machines to fix a distinctively Japanese problem. Cramped urban construction sites cried out for compact excavators. That friction brought on innovation, invention, and manufacturing.