WASHINGTON – About a year ago, President Barack Obama showed up at a Phoenix high school to promote changes to immigration law, just as he did Friday at a high school in Las Vegas, where he worked to rally support for his decision to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation.

The focus of last year’s speech was responsible homeownership, not immigration. But he insisted the two are closely tied. “When more people buy homes and play by the rules, home values go up for everybody, and according to one recent study, the average homeowner has already seen the value of their home boosted by thousands of dollars just because of immigration,” Obama said.

More recently, the administration’s top housing officials have echoed that point, sometimes emphasizing the potential of the Hispanic community. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro has said Hispanics “truly are the future” of the housing market. This month, Castro told The Washington Post that if changes in immigration law provide more certainty for the nation’s 11 million undocumented people, “you will see more folks who now are in limbo deciding in the future to actually purchase a home.”

Are Hispanics a powerful force in shaping the housing market? It appears they will be. But they also face challenges, especially when it comes to homeownership.

Millennials – the nation’s largest and most diverse generation – are just entering adulthood and starting to make housing decisions. Of all the minority groups in that generation, Hispanics make up the largest share, according to an analysis by Experian Marketing Services. One in 4 millennials is Hispanic, the analysis said.

Hispanics also are moving into homeownership more rapidly than other racial groups. They are likely to account for 180,000 to 220,000 new homeowners per year from 2010 until 2020, and even more in the 2020s, according to the Urban Institute.

Rolf Pendall, director of the institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, analyzed homeownership trends by race based on three scenarios. The one that would lead to the fastest growth in homeownership rates assumes a strong economy and policies that encourage home purchases.

But even under the “medium” scenario, Hispanics would account for 55.5 percent of new homeowners between 2010 and 2020, said Pendall, who based his analysis on Census Bureau data.

They will be even more of a force in the 2020s, he said. That’s the decade when the number of white homeowners will be declining, in part because the predominantly white baby-boomer generation will be “exiting out of homeownership,” Pendall said.

As for white millennials, they are more of a wild card than Hispanics, Pendall said. Homeownership rates among young whites were up in the 1990s and down the next decade, but they have been consistently trending higher for young Hispanics.

The immigration actions Obama is making could nudge the numbers upward for Hispanics by giving those who are unauthorized more secure status, Pendall said.

But it’s important to note that the majority of Hispanics in the United States are native-born, not immigrants. The number of unauthorized immigrants in this country has not grown since the recession hit, largely because migration from Mexico has slowed, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Even with the president’s changes in place, and even if Congress acts on immigration, Hispanics still face many barriers to homeownership. Although the recession ended five years ago, economic conditions for Hispanics haven’t improved much, and that cuts into their ability to own homes.

Between 2010 and 2013, the median income fell 9 percent for Hispanic families, compared with just 1 percent for white families, according to the Federal Reserve Board’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances. In the same time period, the median net worth of white families rose 2 percent to $142,000, but the median for Hispanic families fell 17 percent to $18,100.

“Latinos and Latino families were adversely affected by the housing downturn, and even during the recovery they continued to fall behind,” said Enrique Lopezlira, a senior policy adviser at the National Council of La Raza.

Lopezlira cited research from the National Employment Law Project that found that 35 percent of the job gains among Hispanics from 2007 to 2012 came from low-wage jobs, even though such positions represented only 6 percent of the jobs lost.

Add to that the limited U.S. credit histories of many immigrants and it’s no wonder that Hispanics are having a tough time qualifying for mortgages. In the wake of the housing bust, lenders have tightened lending standards beyond what the government requires for mortgages that are backed by the federal government.

But there’s hope. Lopezlira points to analyses from the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress, which project that wages for unauthorized immigrants will improve 8 to 9 percent because of the president’s executive action, which could help some of them get mortgages.