I can’t think of a worse American policy idea than giving preferential treatment letting companies exploit American workers more aggressively, but only if the owners of the company who will profit from this are not American.
This is about temporarily allowing companies such as TSMC to bring in their specialized fab building construction companies to get these mega projects built on time instead of insisting on fully local non-specialized labor.
I think the key part of the proposal that you are missing is that it eventually (i.e. after a decade) gets rolled back to a normal economic zone and the special foreign privileges get rolled back.
What you want is just insist that a small contingent of local specialized project teams be allowed to shadow the foreign teams. Its a bit of a marshmallow test for unions.
That kind of thing already exists. It’s trivial for large and well resourced foreign companies to bring in specialized foreign teams to work alongside American workers.
What’s happening here is TSMC just wants to undercut local wages.
There are actually people who have gone in and done real reporting in the situation beyond reading press releases.
I don’t think the exception would be just for foreign companies. It could be a geography set aside for free trade and no tariffs. This kind of thing worked very well in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and (the entire country of) Singapore for example.
We don't need to eat the whole pie! We'd still get the taxes, wages, institutional training to develop skilled labor, and onshoring. Let them keep their IP and profit from their evolution.
I can’t think of a worse American policy idea than giving preferential treatment letting companies exploit American workers more aggressively, but only if the owners of the company who will profit from this are not American.