President Barack Obama said Wednesday that passing immigration reform would produce a spike in home ownership, echoing one of the steps to revitalizing the housing market that he outlined in a speech in Arizona a day earlier.
“If we get immigration reform done, suddenly you’ve got all kinds of families coming out of the shadows, paying taxes, paying penalties, and they’re also going to be really likely to buy homes,” the president said at a Los Angeles roundtable with housing website Zillow.com. “They add value to a community.”
Those families would be likely to buy homes in areas with high rates of foreclosure, Obama said, leading to increasing property values that could inject $1 trillion to the economy.
