The Dutch deputy premier has urged the EU to deal with the “negative consequences” of unprecedented levels of labor migration within the bloc, calling for a new common approach to one of the EU’s most cherished principles.
Lodewijk Asscher, who is also social affairs minister, wrote in De Volkskrant newspaper on Saturday that migration from the poorer, newer entrants to the 28-member EU was crowding some western Europeans out of the labor market.
“If we want to continue to profit from the benefits of free movement, then we have to be ready to tackle the negative side-effects, from crowding out to the exploitation [of immigrants],” he said in the article, which was co-signed by David Goodhart, a British campaigner for restrictions on immigration.
His comments echo similar remarks by senior British politicians, including British Prime Minister David Cameron. Britain and the Netherlands have also both called for Brussels to hand back some of its decision-making powers to sovereign governments, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte saying in June that he wanted to see “a smaller, leaner and meaner Europe.”
Asscher stopped short of calling for restrictions on free movement of labor, which would require a new treaty. He argued for rules to punish companies that exploit immigrant labor, both to protect immigrants and prevent companies that stuck to the rules from being priced out of the market.
He gave few details, but said the debate over labor migration should be “high on the agenda” in Brussels.
In raising questions about the free movement of labor, one of the most fundamental principles underlying the EU, Asscher is reflecting a growing eurosceptic mood in the Netherlands.
Euroscepticism has been aggravated by a weak Dutch economy, which is still in recession while the rest of the euro zone is returning to growth. Unemployment in the Netherlands hit a record high of 8.7 percent last month.
Rutte’s business-friendly Liberal Party and Asscher’s Labour Party, its coalition partner, have both taken a beating in polls since being elected on a broadly pro-European agenda in September last year. Voters have flocked to eurosceptic parties like the Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders and the Socialist Party.
“If you see which part of the population is most disappointed in the government, it’s especially people with little and lower education and little and lower incomes,” said Maurice De Hond, a pollster.
“They are becoming unemployed because of competition from east European immigrants,” he said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS