After Helen Wang finishes work at the new microchip plant in Arizona, she drives home to start her side hustle: cooking pots of spicy beef soup and pork noodles for Taiwanese colleagues who are hungry for a taste of home. The workers and their families have turned a mostly white corner of strip-mall suburbia into a cultural haven, populating the area with Taiwanese businesses and adopting the company’s food traditions.
The first workers arrived from Taiwan two years ago to work at a chip factory operated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The company is a crucial part of President Biden’s effort to bolster advanced chip production in the United States.
The future of the TSMC’s Arizona factory and the lives of its Taiwanese workers rest on whether President-elect Donald J. Trump will try to undercut government aid for the company or impose new restrictions on foreign workers. The Taiwanese workers have had to adapt to a new life of long workdays, freeways, and blistering desert heat 7,200 miles from home.
The growing numbers of workers are seeding a cultural and demographic shift, with Taiwanese businesses and culture spreading rapidly through the area. Real estate developers are converting a beige outdoor mall into an Asian shopping center, while others are hoping to build Taiwanese-style townhouses in the desert.
Many Taiwanese employees and their families have struggled with the absence of universal health care, different traffic rules, and a new culture, but as a whole, they are finding their feet in this sparsely populated land that is the opposite of Taiwan, an island of nearly 24 million people a little bigger in size than Maryland.
However, the arrival of the Taiwanese workers has also stoked tension inside the plant, where about half of the approximately 2,200 employees have been brought in from Taiwan. Labor unions in Arizona complained when TSMC sought visas for 500 Taiwanese workers to install highly specialized equipment, and 13 former employees have filed a lawsuit accusing TSMC of having an “anti-American culture.”
The fate of the TSMC’s Arizona factory and the lives of its Taiwanese workers depend on whether President-elect Trump will try to undercut government aid or impose new restrictions on foreign workers. The Taiwanese workers, however, are too busy adjusting to their new life to worry about the geopolitics of immigration and trade. They are building a new community, one that is slowly but surely spreading its roots deep into the Sonoran Desert.