Dan Wang Says TSMC Phoenix Fabs Hinge on Taiwanese Engineers

TSMC employs more than 3,500 workers at its Arizona site, including Taiwanese engineers on temporary visas who flew in to teach Americans how to build the world's most advanced semiconductors. More than 300 babies have been born to those families in Arizona. Those are the numbers at the center of Dan Wang's New York Times opinion essay arguing that the Phoenix factory shows "a winning formula for American reindustrialization."

Wang's central line: "TSMC is doing for America what Apple did for China." The most important thing the company offers, he writes, is "not money, equipment or local employment but what's known as process knowledge," the kind of manufacturing know-how that can't be written down because it lives in the hands and heads of the people who do it.

In July, TSMC announced it will invest more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in Arizona for ten chip production plants, two packaging facilities and a research and development site. Wang grounds the piece in two research trips to the Phoenix area this year, and in interviews where TSMC engineers and their families "marveled" at the large homes, the friendly community and the opportunities for their children, while reporting that American math and science classes were a breeze compared with Taiwan.

Wang closes on an immigration argument. "The U.S. can successfully address both its manufacturing needs and its national security," he writes, "but only if the administration fully embraces the newcomers who wish to build their lives here."