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CNN: We have breaking news now from the Pentagon. CNN can now report that roughly 500 Marines based out of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in California have been mobilized to respond to the protests in Los Angeles, according to three people familiar with the matter, and will join the National Guard troops that were activated by President Donald Trump over the weekend without the consent of California’s governor or the city’s mayor. The deployment of the full Marine battalion marks a significant escalation in Trump’s use of the military as a show of force against protesters, but it is still unclear what their task will be once in LA, the sources said.

California’s attorney general announced the state will sue the administration after President Donald Trump ordered the deployment of National Guard troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles this weekend.

Rob Bonta called Trump’s federalization of the state’s National Guard troops “unnecessary, counterproductive, and most importantly, unlawful,” during a news conference today.

 
UtakataNoAnnex said:
It goes to the point that the undocumented actually stabilize the economy in many sectors, in addition to bringing money into the local economies that doesn't leave the country...because they're doing jobs no one else wants to really do.
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If there were no undocumented workers, a lot of those unwanted jobs would be replaced by technology and production innovations. For example, iIf you look at a pork plant in Denmark (a top global producer) there’s hardly any people, with machines doing much of the work. In the US (and increasingly in Canada through TFW and bogus study permits) they can rely on thousands of hands to do the piece work, resulting in notably lower innovation investments for the country as a whole. If the US removes the cheap, undocumented workforce the food will still get grown, pools dug, roofs re-shingled, and chickens killed and cleaned for market. It will just be done differently, and for a time more expensively until market forces drove down prices. It took decades for the US to get into this pickle, it will take a decade or more to extricate itself.
 
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Admiral Beez said:
If there were no undocumented workers, a lot of those unwanted jobs would be replaced by technology and production innovations. For example, iIf you look at a pork plant in Denmark (a top global producer) there’s hardly any people, with machines doing much of the work. In the US (and increasingly in Canada through TFW and bogus study permits) they can rely on thousands of hands to do the piece work, resulting in notably lower innovation investments for the country as a whole. If the US removes the cheap, undocumented workforce the food will still get grown, pools dug, roofs re-shingled, and chickens killed and cleaned for market. It will just be done differently, and for a time more expensively until market forces drove down prices. It took decades for the US to get into this pickle, it will take a decade or more to extricate itself.
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Even if all of the gardeners, agricultural workers, household staff, factory workers and others were replaced by technology, it would still cost more. If it were more cost effective, it would have been implemented already. Americans want low prices, they don’t care about working conditions. They do seem to have a problem “connecting the dots” to understand that the cheap products they want actually come with a price and what they are doing isn’t going to make America great again
 
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US Northern Command has released these photos of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines preparing to deploy to Los Angeles. Governor Newsom has said the Marines should not be deployed to face “their own countrymen to fulfill the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial President.”
 
PinkLucy said:
Even if all of the gardeners, agricultural workers, household staff, factory workers and others were replaced by technology, it would still cost more. If it were more cost effective, it would have been implemented already. Americans want low prices, they don’t care about working conditions. They do seem to have a problem “connecting the dots” to understand that the cheap products they want actually come with a price and what they are doing isn’t going to make America great again
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I think both you and @Admiral Beez are correct here.

That is to say, low wages stifle investments in productivity and innovation are very much a problem in Canada, not just at the low end of the wage spectrum either.

Industry here (both manufacturing and service) relies heavily on the cost advantage of the exchange rate.

We can actually deliver a TV show or a call centre or IT staff at 1/3 cheaper than the U.S. before factoring in any tax credits.
But the result is that the players here are often slow to innovate, they have a baked-in win......but one that goes away if the U.S.dollar falls/the Canadian dollar rises in a material way.

Business can be quite lazy about making investments that serve the long term, when that might actually depress earnings in the next few quarters.......

****

Not every productivity investment is technology it should be said, in the case of gardening, switching to native perennial plants, that can thrive with little attention vs grass or annuals can greatly reduce the need for human
maintenance.

But this is also the technological aspects such as irrigation, or the use of slow-grow grass that may require mowing once every 4-5 weeks instead of every 1-2.

Changing over costs some money and time; but the end result may actually be cheaper.

***

The same applies in agriculture. Some of the new Canadian greenhouse operations are very automated, and very efficient. Have a look at the price of all those Ontario-grown English cucumbers
the next time you're in the market. The price isn't rising...........its dropping. You're looking at median prices (off-season/on-season, promo-/non-promo) that under $1.50 per cucumber which is well less than what it was 10 years
ago. Ontario is now so dominant in this space w/this crop, that we are exporting in large quantities to the U.S.

Not every crop lends itself to the same degree of automation. But Ontario has become a leader in greenhouse tomatoes too, and field tomatoes in the U.S. are among the most migrant intensive crops.

In general, where the cheap labour is domestic in the U.S. I would expect a shift (if wages rose) that would lead to a short-term price pop....as the investments in productivity were made, but longer term, I don't see it as all that inflationary.

Where you would see a greater difference is repatriating work that has largely been exported, particularly apparel and linens.

Bringing those back as large-scale industry in the U.S., in their current form, would be highly inflationary, probably on the order of 100% (ie. a $10 T-shirt goes to $20)

However, I would expect, in the event of such a move, that you would seem some automation take the edge off.........again there is no pressure to do that when Nike can churn out shoes at a landed cost of $18 per
pair in the developing world and sell them for more than 10x that here.

Better paid labour would result increases in retail costs.........though not as much as one might think, a 50% increase in employee costs would represent a 5-10% increase in the cost of your combo.
 
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