We’re kind of caught by the balls as workers no?

You don’t need to fab chips to have a job. Let the Taiwanese have their speciality you have yours what’s wrong with that.

Also TSMC’s company culture is excessively Confucian you probably wouldn’t want to work there anyway. It’s not just the company and culture that makes the company but also things like Taiwanese universities churning out masses of highly-skilled electrical engineers, basically the only reason TSMC even agreed to that European joint-venture is because Dresden’s universities have been focussed on that exact field for decades, even before reunification. For a similar reason you couldn’t just take Zeiss and move it out of Jena: They need the local university to funnel students into their workforce. There’s no better place to study optics in the world than Jena.

Which actually brings me to another point: All these are labour aristocracy jobs, not just trained but highly educated, comparable to a doctor at a hospital. They have a lobby, they have a good bargaining position. Worrying about them won’t do anything for the burger flipper at your local fast-food joint who tends to have neither. It also won’t really do much for the injection moulding machine operator producing tea sieves (sorry I was just admiring one it has stainless steel mesh embedded in it, not easy to produce, made in Germany, not cheap but oh gods is that thing worth the extra three bucks (it was five)).