THE GROWTH CANDIDATE:

Hillary Clinton's increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November.

In recent weeks, as her leads over GOP nominee Donald Trump have expanded, Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate.

While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws -- the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year -- and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation's roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports. [...]

Clinton has lately been telling Democratic audiences about her growing support among Republicans and touting what she says is a record of successfully working across the aisle to get things done. Her campaign regularly trumpets Republican endorsements and GOP disavowals of Trump.

A recently published working paper from the San Francisco Fed shows that the fiscal multiplier of infrastructure spending is much larger than the typical government spending multiplier.

Sylvain Leduc and Daniel Wilson studied the effect of unexpected infrastructure grants on state GDPs (GSPs) since 1990 and found that, on average, each dollar of infrastructure spending increases the GSP by at least two dollars. Valerie Ramey, Professor of Economics at UC San Diego and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, reports that the typical fiscal multiplier is between 0.5 and 1.5.

Immigration benefits America in at least two ways. First, increased immigration expands the American workforce and encourages more business start-ups. Second, immigrants increase economic efficiency by raising the supply of low- and high-skilled immigrants. In many cases immigrants' educational backgrounds complement, rather than displace, the skills of the native-born labor market.

For instance, on the low-skill end of the spectrum, 91 percent of native-born Americans hold high school diplomas or higher, whereas only 62 percent of noncitizens do. Immigrants account for about 16 percent of the U.S. labor force, with 24.3 percent of workers who are foreign-born and over the age of 25 not completing high school, compared with merely 4.8 percent of native-born workers. These immigrants work in the agriculture and leisure and hospitality sectors.

Immigrants provide much of the low-skill labor for these industries. Without the immigrant labor, prices consumers pay for hotels and restaurants would be substantially higher, and some agriculture might migrate offshore.

On the high-skill end of the spectrum, 56 percent of engineering doctoral degrees, 51 percent of computer science doctoral degrees, and 44 percent of physics doctoral degrees were awarded in 2011 to students who were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent residents. National Science Foundation data show that 163,000 foreign graduate students studied science and engineering in U.S. universities in 2010, up from 152,000 in 2008.

Immigrants benefit from, and disproportionately contribute to, U.S. research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Many universities rely on graduate students for research assistance and technical expertise, with government research funding training graduate students in the latest technologies. Most research, moreover, does not require security clearances-and little, if any, research is restricted to American students.

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