I am sure there are lots of reasons that jobs are leaving the country that probably cannot be isolated to one party or the other but I will tell about my experience in management at US Robotics, a high tech dial up modem maker, in the nineties.  When I got there we were selling 9600bps modems at about $500 a pop.  A company called Hayes was under-selling us by $100 or so.  Upper management went ballistic and told us to redesign and cost reduce the modem.  We did all that but we were still short until we started costing out the effect of manufacturing the modems in the Far East.  The cost reduction was dramatic.  We were able to sell 1400bps Sportster Modems at $200.  To make a long story short, we went from a 5 million dollar company to a 50 million dollar company in 5 years and killed the competition.  We did not lay off any US employees.  We actually ramped up to 3 manufacturing shifts.  We learned that stable products were cheaper to produce in the Orient.  However, since we were coming out with about 100 new products a quarter world-wide we found that new products, less stable, did better in our manufacturing facilities. 

There are several reasons why the Far East can manufacture cheaper than us:

1)       Their cost of living is cheaper.

2)       They can pay their labor a lot less.

3)       There were no unions so the companies could work their employees literally to death in some cases or fire them.

4)       Some of those governments illegally (with regard to trade treaties) underwrite the manufacturing costs.  Part of the issue with this is a legitimate issue that foreign countries make…some of those countries fund R&D much like we do here for things like NIH, Defense, etc. so the companies do not need to take the R&D cost out of their cost of goods sold.

The US Chamber of Commerce along with big American based companies in China is actively siding with the Chinese government and those Chinese companies to oppose labor union in China.  For more info see:

http://www.fpif.org/articles/labor_rights_in_china

I think this presents many problems for us.  The Chinese government and businesses will not be able to hold this tide off forever.  The Chinese people will demand better working conditions and better pay.  If we stand in the way we risk losing the good will of the Chinese people.  Also, they are just starting to go through what we went through some decades ago.  If their cost of production rises it will only help manufacturing jobs in the US.

Here is another thought, white collar jobs are now following the blue collar trend.  India is gobbling of professional software jobs from the US for many of the reasons that China gobbled up manufacturing jobs.   We need to understand that our pain is due to a world economy that is allowing more impoverished countries to increase the standard of living.  We need to let them go through the process until economic conditions normalize.  If we try to stamp every fire out that pops up we are going to make enemies in the world and we still not stop the tide.

IMO, protectionism or exploitative capitalism will only hurt us in the long run.  We need to respond with innovation, retraining, budding new markets and we probably still will not be able to stop the pain just mitigate it.  When I got out of undergraduate school with a BS in Electrical Engineering I had my pick of a dozen jobs.  A young graduate now can hardly get a technician position now with that degree.

I think it is also useful to think of this type of economic cycle in terms of our own immigration problems as well.