How about instead of building concentration camps, we build chip factories, and employ all the people we’re abusing? Then they can spend their earnings, and pay taxes, and stimulate the economy.

Not sure if there are sarcasm tags here, but the capital costs for a leading edge chip factory are unreal. It took a transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, a lot of blurring between capitalism and a planned economy, decades of concentrated investment, and luck for TSMC to get where they are.

As a national effort in the US, it’d make the Apollo Program seem trivial. It’d be a bit like saying “lets turn all the immigrants into astronauts.”

Not that the immigration situation isn’t utterly cruel and ridiculous and that we should be bringing these people in with open arms, but one can’t just will chipmaking into existance quickly. It’s extremely difficult. It’s why the potential collapse of Intel is such a calamity, as it would be almost impossible to rebuild, and why the atrophy of Global Foundries can’t be reversed as much as Europe would like to.