How do you stimulate the U.S. economy when the workers you retain or rehire with your stimulus billions head for Walmarts on Saturday to buy goods made in Japan, Korea and China?

Our $6 trillion in trade deficits in the Bush decade stimulated economies all over the world, just not our own. Indeed, the most successful economies of the last decade were China and Germany. Not coincidentally, they were the world’s two largest exporting countries.

There are time-honored ways that nations have turned around such situations. What prevents us from adopting them? An ignorance of our own history, the immense investment of our transnational corporations in the new global arrangement, and the opposition of a World Trade Organization to which we have surrendered our national sovereignty.

A second reason why the median income of American families is back to 1996 levels and sinking is mass immigration, legal and illegal.

According to analyst Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.com, the United States, despite an unemployment rate above 9 percent, imports 100,000 immigrant workers every single month. Numbers USA contends that 125,000 foreign workers are brought in every month.

Thus, well over a million workers are added annually to our labor force when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

Why are we doing this?

Is it xenophobic to say our own citizens should come first, that the importation of foreign workers must halt until our own unemployed have found jobs?

A huge share of our immigrant population is Hispanic. And Rubenstein finds that for every 100 Hispanics employed in the United States in year 2001, 126 are employed today. But for every 100 non-Hispanics employed in 2001, only 98 are working today.

What prevents our politicians from putting Americans first, deporting illegal aliens and suspending the importation of foreign labor until our own workers are back on the job?

Politics is one reason. Democrats see illegal aliens and their children as future Democratic voters. Republicans are terrified of being called racists and alienating the ethnic lobbies.

Crass commercial interest is another reason.

U.S. companies see immigrants, legal or illegal, as an endless source of cheap labor to keep wage costs down. And they are right.

But who is looking out for the national interest, for all of the members of the American family, especially the unemployed?

If the median income of the American family is falling, already back to where it was in Bill Clinton’s first term, Middle America is one of the big losers in the global economy. And who are the big winners?