Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992 using James Carville's slogan "It's the economy, stupid." The Democrats thus capitalized on a temporary economic recession during the last year of George H.W. Bush's administration.

Could 2008 be a repeat performance? The falling stock market, rising unemployment, skyrocketing oil prices, subprime mortgage collapse and the Michigan recession have moved to front and center in the primaries.

Will the Republicans get it? Or will they just keep mouthing their tired mantras about free trade, the global economy, the world is flat, we have to be more competitive, send more students to community colleges and teach more math and science?

Will the Democrats get it, or just keep mouthing their Big Government mantras that we need more taxpayer-paid social services? The liberal New York Times calls on us to "embrace globalization," and to compensate for job losses (which it speaks of with elitist disdain as "dislocations") by extended unemployment benefits, more progressive taxation, tax-paid lifetime retraining of workers, socialized medicine and more income handouts to low-wage workers through the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The private-enterprise system did not cause the loss of jobs. It's the result of bad U.S. policies and one-sided trade agreements that allow foreign governments to discriminate against American workers and products.

It's a very bad U.S. policy to invite millions of illegal aliens to come into the U.S., take low-wage jobs and cash in on the social benefits that U.S. taxpayers generously provide to low-income households (estimated by the Heritage Foundation at a net cost of $20,000 per year).

It's also a very bad U.S. policy to tolerate the H-1B and L-1 racket that is bringing in hundreds of thousands of skilled foreigners, particularly from Asia, to take jobs away from Americans. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, says that the H-1B program is "now replacing the U.S. labor force."

The public is falsely led to believe that only 65,000 H-1B visas are permitted per year to take jobs for which no American can be found. The true figure is closer to 400,000 annually, because the number is increased by an additional 20,000 foreigners who get graduate degrees from U.S. universities, by foreigners who are completely exempt from the count because they work for research, educational or non-profits, and by 315,000 L-1 visas for which there is no cap at all.

The specific purpose of L-1 visas is to allow multinational companies to transfer managers and specialists within the company for a limited time. The high number now issued annually indicates that the multinationals are abusing L-1s as a back door to bring in lower-paid workers, not for a legitimate rotation of managers and specialized employees.

Tata Consultancy, for example, obtained 4,887 L-1s in fiscal 2006. Tata refused to answer questions from the tech journal InfoWorld, which called the H-1B/L-1 racket the fifth-most-underreported tech story of 2007. Continued...