Dan Wang wrote The Factory in Phoenix That Could Save American Manufacturing for The New York Times opinion section on Oct. 23, reporting from Phoenix on the Taiwanese engineers training American workers at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.’s Arizona chip plants. His central argument: “TSMC is doing for America what Apple did for China.”
Wang contrasts China’s mastery of manufacturing with America’s loss of what he calls “process knowledge,” the accumulated industrial expertise that lives in workers’ hands and heads and cannot be written down. TSMC’s Arizona facilities now employ more than 3,500 people, including skilled Taiwanese engineers on temporary visas who are teaching Americans skills the country lost when factories closed. “The United States doesn’t lack capital,” Wang writes. “What America really lacks is skill: the practice of building semiconductors, automobiles, electronics and many other industries in which U.S. companies used to lead the world.”
The piece warns that immigration policy threatens this transfer. Wang points to the September 2025 Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a Hyundai-LG battery plant under construction in Georgia, where officers arrested nearly 500 people, most of them South Korean, though at least some held valid visas. “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,” he writes. Over two reporting trips, he interviewed Taiwanese families who have moved to north Phoenix, documenting their adjustment to sprawling American suburbs, 113-degree heat and a public school system that ranks among the nation’s lowest in graduation rates.
Wang’s argument extends the engineering-state thesis of Breakneck to the American side. For executives weighing reshoring decisions, the essay offers a ground-level account of what moves manufacturing capability across borders: not just equipment or capital, but people, visas and the communities that support them.
Wang is a contributing writer for New York Times Opinion, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution’s History Lab at Stanford University and the author of the New York Times bestseller Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. He lived in China from 2017 to 2023 and is one of the most-cited experts on China and technology. He has delivered corporate keynotes for UBS, Jane Street, Stripe, Apple and Intel, and has briefed senior U.S. and European government officials.
Wang is exclusively represented by Stellant Group for speaking engagements, including keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions with leadership teams thinking through trade exposure, manufacturing strategy and competition in an economy shaped by both Chinese and American systems. For consulting or advisory engagements, contact Stellant Group for a custom proposal.
