On July 5, the Northwest Chinese Baptist Church in Phoenix opened its weekly Mandarin service with a verse from the Old Testament. A pianist, a guitarist and a drummer prepared to lead the 100 congregants in song. The deacon read out the preamble to the Declaration of Independence — “We hold these truths to be self-evident” — and then invited the congregation to rise and sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It was a good moment to exalt American ideals. The prior night, fireworks marked America’s 250th anniversary of independence.
The next speaker was a guest, Timothy Cheng, chief executive of a Christian media company. Flicking through a slide presentation, he spoke about the significance of semiconductors, noting that chips made in Taiwan are the lifeblood of the American economy. He clicked to the next slide. The faces of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang emerged on the screen.
“In earlier years, Western missionaries brought knowledge, education and English to the East,” Mr. Cheng said. “They brought the Gospels and Western medicine. Now that Taiwanese have become fortunate and strong, why should they not transfer knowledge to the United States to make it powerful?”
This sermon would be less surprising if you knew that one of the church’s pastors was a former Intel engineer. And he was preaching in a church located 20 minutes south of one of the most advanced semiconductor factories in the world, a facility known as TSMC Arizona.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is the world’s most advanced chipmaker. It is the company that Apple and Nvidia turn to for the most complex components of their most intricate technologies. That skill has propelled TSMC’s market cap to $2 trillion. It might be worth even more if TSMC didn’t manufacture nearly all of its chips in Taiwan, the nation that China’s Communist Party has long coveted. When typically bullish investment banks imagine a war over the island, they reach for words like “global economic depression,” “trillions in losses,” and, sometimes, “World War III.”
In 2020, TSMC announced it would build a semiconductor production facility in Arizona. It was lured by proximity to its American customers, the carrot of federal subsidies and unsubtle political pressure from the Trump administration, which has, correctly, touted the effort as the largest ever foreign direct investment into the United States. In July, TSMC announced its intention to invest a total of more than a quarter of a trillion dollars for 10 chip production plants, two packaging facilities and a research and development site, all in Arizona. TSMC now employs over 3,500 people in the state, including skilled Taiwanese engineers on temporary visas. This month, TSMC’s C.E.O. said that the company is exploring an investment in Texas.
The United States invented the semiconductor, the tiny computer processor that powered the digital age, and its biggest firms dominated the industry for decades. Then chipmakers like Intel and Texas Instruments fell behind. The hardware powering the A.I. boom is now made mostly in East Asia.
TSMC Arizona is rebuilding America’s manufacturing backbone by teaching Americans the skills that they have lost, just as the speaker at the Northwest Chinese Baptist Church predicted. For the most important asset TSMC offers is not money, equipment or local employment, but what’s known as process knowledge. The United States doesn’t lack capital. American companies are flush with cash and can conjure marvelous funds to chase new technologies. It doesn’t lack the ability to buy advanced tooling either. What America really lacks is skill: the practice of building semiconductors, automobiles, electronics and many other industries in which U.S. firms used to lead the world.
Thousands of teachers of these skills, in the form of Taiwanese engineers, have moved to north Phoenix. Many bring their families in tow. Earlier generations of immigrants departed their homelands on their individual initiative, as my parents did from China and Canada, to make a new life in America. New immigrants from Taiwan more closely resemble corporate shock troops on a mission to build chips fast.
Over two trips to Phoenix this year, I saw a winning formula for American reindustrialization. For six years, I lived in China and observed how Chinese companies became global leaders, in part because American firms brought them better technology and management. In Arizona, I saw how Taiwanese engineers are training American workers to build some of the most complex technologies in the world. TSMC is doing for America what Apple did for China.
And guess what? TSMC engineers and their families are having a great time. In interviews, they marveled at their new lives in the Sunbelt: the large homes, the friendly community, the opportunities for their kids.
The question is how long this can last. Arizona itself has a mixed record when it comes to welcoming immigrants. And one year ago, on the other side of the country, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained hundreds of South Korean citizens at a battery plant that was being built in Georgia, which was also touted as a crucial investment for America’s manufacturing future. At any moment, the jerkiness of President Trump’s immigration policy could also upend the lives of Taiwanese workers, and by extension, this vital experiment in reindustrialization.
Geopolitics brought TSMC to Arizona; domestic American politics might send the Taiwanese back home. So far, businesses, political leaders and churches in Arizona have rallied around to help, paying attention to whether the transplants can find a doctor or ingredients for an oyster omelet. The U.S. can successfully address both its manufacturing needs and its national security — but only if the administration fully embraces the newcomers who wish to build their lives here. When a Taiwanese firm brings a work force to the United States, it is imparting the world’s most precious thing: knowledge on advanced technological production that can help America regain its edge.
America created the chip industry. It was also an early mover in airplanes, cars, rare earths, telecommunications equipment and more. The United States remains the world’s second-largest manufacturer. But it’s hard to remain proud of its most storied companies. Detroit automakers have been in genteel decline for decades. The poor health of apex manufacturers such as Boeing and Intel has grown palpable more recently. Despite spending billions to accelerate production, the U.S. military is running low on critical munitions.
Instead, it is America’s chief geopolitical competitor that leads in so many of these advanced technologies. Today, China is responsible for around one-third of the world’s manufacturing output — producing twice as much output, by value, as the United States does. It has wrested leadership away from the United States in rare earths and provides the vast majority of the world’s supply, as well as cars, especially the electric kind. Chinese A.I. companies are the only ones in the world that can look upon their Silicon Valley counterparts as peers.
Tales of factory closings in the United States have often been mirrored by headlines of American corporations opening factories in China. It’s not an accident that American firms lost their leadership in various manufacturing sectors as they started shifting production overseas. They off-shored labor-intensive production to Asia, betting they could hold on to the more valuable work of research and development.
I’ve been writing for much of the decade about the idea that design and manufacturing are one and the same thing. I watched how Chinese firms, including Huawei, BYD and Xiaomi, used their mastery of manufacturing to make ever more sophisticated products and take on more complex R&D. Over the past two decades, American manufacturers lost their edge when they lost their manufacturing. Today, the center of hardware innovation is not Silicon Valley but Shenzhen, which leveraged its position manufacturing iPhones to build the future of electronics.
The most important ingredient American firms lost was process knowledge. That is the part of production that cannot be written down, because it lives in the hands and heads of workers. It’s the years of industrial expertise about chip production, which is extraordinarily sensitive to minute changes in the thousands of steps involved. When American factories close, they take this accumulated knowledge with them.
TSMC did not locate its factories where the bulk of the Asian population in Arizona already lives. Instead, it chose a spot next to a desert preserve, where giant cactuses and dry brush grow along rocky hiking trails, a region of north Phoenix with the odd but not unappealing name of Biscuit Flats. Longtime residents told me its most notable landmark used to be a gun range. Taiwanese brands have followed the influx of Taiwanese migrants. Phoenix and its surrounding areas have gained 85C Bakery, several new bubble tea shops and two branches of Din Tai Fung, whose soup dumplings are perhaps the most well-known Taiwanese products after semiconductors. (The entire East Coast has but a lone DTF, in New York City.)
Pastor Michael Lin, who led the Phoenix church service I attended, said he has felt a new sense of purpose since so many TSMC families arrived from Taiwan. He lived in Taiwan before moving to Arizona for schooling; after his master’s, he went to work for Intel nearby. Later in life, he became a full-time pastor. When TSMC announced it would establish its plants so close to the Northwest Chinese Baptist Church, Michael took it to be an act of providence. “I feel overwhelmed with gratitude,” he told me as we had lunch.
The pastor and the church have set up English classes for new arrivals. Volunteers engage groups of people for language practice, sometimes at their own homes, focused on conversation for everyday tasks. They help sign children up for school; if a child gets into a fight, they might assist the mediation.
Kimberly Chiu moved with her husband, an engineer at TSMC, and their two teenage daughters to Phoenix at the end of 2022. Asian stores weren’t around then. Ms. Chiu had to visit multiple supermarkets to complete what was for her a basic grocery run. She kept finding herself on a 12-lane highway for simple errands. “We’d consider it a short drive if it took only 20 minutes to get somewhere,” she said.
TSMC helped the family find housing. They enjoyed getting to live in a home that’s much more spacious than their apartment in Taiwan. They found it novel to have a yard. But it was hard to get used to the heat. “I’m scared that the air-conditioning might fail,” said Ms. Chiu. It did, twice, each time after a sandstorm tore through the city.
The temperature rarely dipped below 95 degrees at night when I visited Phoenix in July. It peaked at 113 degrees during the day. Phoenix might be how non-Americans imagine Los Angeles: long drives through sprawl and sandy beauty. It bears little resemblance to the dense and charming streets of Taipei.
Ms. Chiu’s older daughter is attending Arizona State University. Her younger daughter, Olivia, is a senior at high school about 10 miles south of TSMC. The number of Asian students enrolled in this mostly white high school has grown by around 90 since 2021, pushing their share to 8.5 percent of the student body. Olivia, who is outgoing and smiles easily, told me she has embraced her new life. When she had a chance to perform at a charity concert, she sang the role of Anna from Disney’s “Frozen” with gusto.
Sean Chang, a TSMC engineer, invited me to a potluck one night at his home. Mr. Chang and his wife, Shelly, invited a few other families with teenagers to join. I asked a half-dozen of the kids about their experiences in high school. They were relieved that American classes are so much easier than those in Taiwan. The language gap can be a challenge, but math and science classes are a breeze.
Was anyone bullied? They shook their heads: Arizona kids are nice. Then several students brought up food fights. Amanda Chen is a senior who has already been accepted to a university in Texas to play varsity tennis. “Kids start food fights so often,” she said. “They’ve thrown carrot sticks, tomato slices and a cheeseburger.”
The parents are more concerned. Not about food fights — though the idea perplexes them — but about the laxity of education. Arizona’s public schools rank among the lowest in the country for graduation rates and the third-lowest in spending per pupil.
Taiwanese families were enticed to the United States in substantial part by the promise of sending their children to American colleges. Now parents fret the Arizona educational system won’t help their kids get there. They’re nonplused that teachers sometimes wave off assigning homework to high school seniors; some schools allow seniors to take Friday afternoons off. The idea astonishes parents used to spending big sums on extracurricular prep.
The engineers at TSMC are strikingly similar. They are mostly men and universally skittish to chat about work.
Their routines are pretty similar, too. They are out the door around 7:30 a.m. and return home in the evening. Sometimes, they may have to hop on a videoconferencing call at night with colleagues in Taiwan. TSMC job postings make clear that engineers should expect night shifts and weekend work.
Some engineers were not eager to leave Taiwan. At home, there is no more prestigious employer than TSMC. After work, they could go to the many local barbecue or karaoke bars. Now they spend more time with their families. Some have bonded by hiking the desert trails. A few, including Kimberly Chiu, have visited the gun range.
Ms. Chiu and others like her are among the more successful of the transplants. They left professional lives behind, but are glowing about their personal growth after moving to Arizona. Many of the wives have learned to cook, a previously unneeded skill, relying as one could on parents or Taiwan’s splendid array of food options. Although they cannot get fresh oysters for omelets, they have instead the novelty of Trader Joe’s and the chance to shop at an American Costco.
Others have not adjusted as well. One mother spoke to me of her regret that her children went from reading as a family to preferring television and video games. She feels like she understands them less than before.
Taiwanese folks are especially anxious about navigating the American medical system. In Taiwan, medical clinics are plentiful and the state foots much of the bill. In America, the only thing more incomprehensible than the process for receiving medical service is figuring out insurance.
Large American homes can be comfortable; they are also air-conditioned boxes. It’s challenging to be a mother raising a family and barely supported by a husband who is away for most of the day, plus certain nights and weekends. An overseas posting can pile immense stress on a marriage; one person told me of couples who divorced when they returned to Taiwan.
As I chatted with the Taiwanese families, I found myself recalling my own childhood. I am twice an immigrant: the first time when my parents and I moved from southwest China to eastern Canada when I was 7 years old; the second when we moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia when I was 16.
In all ways, the Taiwanese immigrants to Arizona have an easier time than my parents. These new immigrants possess skills the American government has declared critical. They arrive with a job and can plug into a community of expats. They often have the resources to buy a home. The local government has put in enormous effort to make them feel welcome.
My parents had none of these things. My dad was a software developer who spent years jobless; we moved to Canada right after the dot-com crash. My mom was a radio and TV news anchor in China who supported us in Canada by picking up odd jobs as a janitor or in the garment industry. We struggled economically until my dad found employment in Pennsylvania. We had to figure everything out ourselves.
In other ways, my immigration experience is not so different from that of the Taiwanese families. Is it difficult to be outside in the bludgeoning heat of Arizona for months of the year? Well, so too is it a bitter prospect to be outside in the lashing cold of Ottawa.
Church groups are early to reach out to newcomers, as they did with my family. We accepted their overtures, gingerly. My parents and I could not see ourselves as churchgoers. But I liked the group of friendly people my age, while my parents were happy to see me receive language instruction, even if it came with an unbidden helping of Scripture on the side.
In January, the vice president of Taiwan asked the mayor of Phoenix the secret for encouraging Taiwanese families to have kids. More than 300 Taiwanese children have been born to TSMC families in Arizona. “I said that with the sunny weather, everyone’s in a good mood,” said Mayor Kate Gallego, recalling the conversation in an interview.
The mayor is one of several Phoenix power players who worked relentlessly to bring TSMC to Arizona. I was taken aback by the level of enthusiasm that the local government and business leaders have brought to greet the company. There are now nearly daily flights between Phoenix and Taipei. Ms. Gallego told me that even hospitals have stepped up, and an expectant mother can now get a labor and delivery tour in Mandarin. Arizona State University now offers a program to teach students to operate semiconductor machinery.
Still, no immigrants really know what they signed up for — not them, not my family nearly three decades ago. The new life is never exactly as advertised. Next year, I’ll be the age that my dad was when we moved to Canada. I am certain I do not have the courage that my parents brought to establish a new life in a country they hadn’t previously visited, bringing few assets, no community and a 7-year-old child. These Taiwanese families, too, must display courage of their own.
Arizona boosters like to say the state is naturally friendly because a majority of residents are not born here — indeed, about 60 percent of the population, according to U.S. census estimates. Business and government officials say the Taiwanese are the latest beneficiaries.
Still, immigration politics were often on my mind. Arizona is at best selectively friendly to new arrivals. In recent years, it has been strict about enforcing cultural standards, mostly against its Latino population. Joe Arpaio styled himself “America’s toughest sheriff” and rounded up immigrants in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix. In 2010, Arizona enacted SB 1070, which expressly called for “attrition through enforcement” to reduce illegal immigration. The Supreme Court later struck down several of its provisions. Moreover, Mr. Trump came to power for a second time vowing to end illegal immigration and also restrict the legal kind, too.
As I interviewed people in Arizona, I also thought about a large Asian investment on the other side of the country.
Korean giants Hyundai and LG invested billions to build a battery-cell factory in Georgia. Immigration officials raided the site in September 2025. Officers arrested nearly 500 people, putting them in handcuffs and leg shackles. They spent about a week in an ICE detention center as Kristi Noem, then secretary of homeland security, vowed to “deport” them. A Korean news agency published the account of one detainee, who talked about sleeping on moldy mattresses and drinking foul-smelling water. Over 300 flew home on the basis of a negotiated “voluntary departure.”
ICE officials never laid out clear evidence that all of these Korean workers violated the terms of their stay. Reports emerged that at least some had valid visas. The State Department reportedly restored the visas of many detainees after a few weeks. President Trump hosted the chairman of Hyundai in March 2025 when the company announced it would invest $21 billion in the United States. He met the president of South Korea less than two weeks before the raid.
Can Taiwanese immigrants be confident that federal officials will not visit this humiliation upon them? I asked that question to every Arizona government and business official I interviewed.
“Immigration is top of mind for us,” said Christine Mackay. Ms. Mackay was one of the economic development officials who helped to secure TSMC’s investment in Arizona. Now she is the chief executive of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, a public-private partnership to boost economic development.
Local and state government officials try to educate the White House on the national security importance of these companies in Arizona. Nearby Tucson is a major production hub for Tomahawk cruise missiles. And officials advocate extensively for TSMC.
Ms. Mackay has written letters for corporate leaders she was trying to woo to Arizona, which they could show when they entered the United States. Though they carry no legal force, they could smooth entry if Customs and Border Protection had questions. She wrote her personal number on these letters and sometimes fielded calls from border guards.
For now, the workers and the families I spoke with were not much concerned with Mr. Trump’s whims. They assume he knows TSMC is important. Workers and local officials assured me that TSMC is rigorous about following all the rules, including on immigration.
In some ways, the president gets it. After the ICE raid in Georgia, he expressed a degree of regret, telling The Times: “You have to allow them to bring some of their experts with them or they’re never going to be able to open their plant or factory.”
Yet his administration still detained the Korean workers. At the start of his second term, the president denounced the subsidies that the U.S. government has offered semiconductor makers, calling the CHIPS Act a “horrible, horrible thing.”
I’m thinking not only of ICE raids. His administration has twice attempted to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B work visas. Technology workers I know in Silicon Valley feel deeply uncertain about their future in the United States. A.I. researchers from China and software developers from India are rethinking whether they ought to build their lives here.
TSMC Arizona’s first plant has been producing chips for two years, and its rate of output in Phoenix is comparable to that in Taiwan. Despite some turbulence with permitting and union relations, Ms. Mackay told me that the second and third factories are being built ahead of schedule. TSMC’s announcement in July that it would raise its total investment to $265 billion is an obvious sign of confidence in Arizona’s operations.
Morris Chang, the founder of TSMC, has sounded positively bitter that the company has invested so much in the United States. He has called America’s effort to reshore semiconductors “a very expensive exercise in futility.” He grumbles that costs in the U.S. are much higher than in Taiwan. Mr. Chang retired in 2018, but has barely restrained himself from weighing in on Arizona. No matter how successful TSMC Arizona becomes, it is a small part of TSMC’s total chip production.
I feel one more worry when I think about Mr. Trump’s volatility — it is a twinge of fear that Mr. Chang is wrong, and that this facility will be a success, and that its success will destabilize the Taiwan Strait.
It is possible that TSMC Arizona endears more Americans to the fate of the island. It’s also possible Mr. Trump will decline to send American troops to defend Taiwan if he believes that its core technologies are already on American soil. Beijing has promised “reunification” with this self-governing island, though it does not appear committed to any immediate invasion. Mr. Trump displays at best a lukewarm commitment to defending liberal democracies. Either way, Arizona is now complicating the already uncertain geopolitics of the Pacific.
TSMC sends engineers to Arizona on contracts of up to three years, which means that the first wave of families to move to the United States are returning home. Some of them told me they want to build lives in the United States in large part to give their kids the chance to integrate — and there are legal pathways for doing so. Several others want to as well, for their kids’ education, or because they prefer the American lifestyle. Others return to their old lives in Taiwan with relief.
TSMC Arizona ought to be embraced as a beacon of America’s revitalized industrialization. A few decades ago, Japanese automakers introduced new management techniques and engineering processes to the United States that gave a boost to the competitiveness of American automakers. Beijing understands this principle. Chinese policymakers know that American companies like Apple and Tesla, in addition to training the local work force to the world’s highest standards, lit a fire under Chinese firms to improve their own products.
You don’t hear that from American policymakers. It’s more common to find short-term complaints that a worker coming from Taiwan is displacing a job that could go to an American.
One could see the community efforts to support the Taiwanese families as an example of spontaneous American welcome. One could also see them as improvised and contingent. If there weren’t a friendly Taiwanese pastor next to the factory, then fewer families would have received language and education support.
Though Phoenix has surpassed itself in helpfulness, it was not that long ago that the state of Arizona passed a law attempting to achieve “attrition through enforcement.” The White House appears to pay scant attention to the Taiwanese newcomers. If Mr. Trump’s attention drifts, immigration enforcement can wreck this whole project over the course of a morning, which is about how long it took to arrest a few hundred Koreans.
I consider TSMC Arizona to be an example of American success in its technological competition with China. Could we imagine Germany or France getting a quarter of a trillion dollars of TSMC investment and integrating many happy Asian families? I doubt it. Though the United States has fallen behind on manufacturing, it still enjoys geopolitical heft as well as an advantage few other industrialized countries have: ambitious people want to live in America. They are attracted to economic opportunity, the chance to build their families and, to varying degrees, by American values: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
People on the coasts rarely talk about the American dream, an idea that still means something to these Taiwanese arrivals. TSMC is grafting a Taiwanese engineering community onto the American economy. The United States has the opportunity to prove once again it can renew itself through the ambitions of newcomers — and transform into something greater in turn.
Dan Wang is a contributing Opinion writer and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
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