Walk the hallways of any major hospital in Prince George’s County on a Tuesday morning. Step into a nursing home along the Silver Spring corridor after midnight. The patterns repeat. Nigerian nurses chart patient notes between rounds. Cameroonian aides guide elderly residents to meals. Ghanaian home health workers start predawn shifts in homes across Montgomery County. These are not isolated moments. They form the daily portrait of healthcare labor in the Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia region.
This is one of the most important workforce stories of our time. It is also among the least told.
The Numbers Behind the Work
Nearly 2.8 million foreign-born workers hold jobs in the U.S. healthcare sector, making up 18 percent of the total industry workforce. Within that group, African-born professionals carry a growing share of frontline roles in nursing, home health, and long-term care.
Maryland sits near the center of this shift. Immigrants make up more than 50 percent of the home health aide workforce in Maryland and account for 23 percent of all registered nurses in the state. That figure reflects structural dependence, not a supporting role.
Maryland ranks among the top states for immigrant registered nurses, with foreign-born workers making up 30 percent of that group, trailing only Nevada and California. At the physician level, immigrants represent 28 percent of Maryland’s doctors and surgeons, one of the higher shares nationally.
The region’s African population adds further weight to these numbers. The DC metro area holds the fourth-largest African-born population in the country, according to U.S. Census data. Local officials, including Prince George’s County Council member Wala Blegay, say even that count is low, since second-generation Africans frequently go uncounted in standard demographic surveys.
How the DMV Became the Destination
African healthcare workers did not arrive in these numbers by chance. Geography, policy, and community networks shaped their path over decades.
Maryland developed dense diaspora communities in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. Those communities created housing networks, job referrals, and social support for new arrivals. Remi Duyile, a Nigerian-born adjunct professor at Bowie State University who came to the U.S. in the early 1980s, explained the pull clearly: the presence of embassies, international organizations, and federal agencies drew educated African migrants to the region first. Healthcare followed.
One name that stands out in this landscape is Dr. Anyinke Atabong, a Cameroonian dual board-certified psychiatric mental health and family nurse practitioner with nearly two decades of clinical experience. Governor Wes Moore appointed her to Maryland’s Commission on African Affairs, where she now serves as the DC-Maryland-Virginia regional director for The African Think Tank. Her work focuses on reducing health disparities between Africans and African Americans across the region. Her appointment signals how visible, and how valued, the African professional presence in Maryland healthcare has become.
Another is Dr. Adebisi Allison, a Nigerian-born nurse practitioner who earned her doctorate in nursing leadership from Chamberlain University. She founded BC Healthcare Services LLC, serves as a primary care provider for over 300 patients at a major Washington DC nursing facility, and has conducted medical missions across multiple Nigerian states. She built that trajectory working within the DMV healthcare network, beginning at the community level and rising through clinical leadership.
Then there is Obiageli “Oby” Duru-Anoumatacky, who came from Nigeria to the United States two decades ago. She now works as a nurse practitioner at Mobile Medical Care in Montgomery County, Maryland, a nonprofit that provides accessible care to underserved populations, where she focuses on HIV prevention and community health equity. These are not outliers. They represent a pattern.
Nigeria ranks among the top sources of foreign-trained nurses entering the U.S. CGFNS International, the organization that screens international nursing credentials, processed applications at nearly 200 percent above pre-pandemic levels in fiscal year 2024, with Kenya ranking third among all source countries and Nigeria and Ghana both showing strong growth.
The scale of Nigerian professional organizing in the DMV reflects that pipeline. The DMV chapter of the Yoruba Nurses of North America brings together nurses with specialties across acute, primary, and community care. The National Association of Nigerian Nurses in North America, which includes a dedicated DMV chapter, runs annual scientific conferences on global health and provides training, networking, and advocacy for Nigerian nurses across the region. The Association of Nigerian Nurse Practitioners in North America held a community health fair at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Landover, Maryland in 2024, connecting patients with free screenings and care referrals.
These are not informal social gatherings. They are professional associations with clinical reach, and they operate extensively across Prince George’s County and the wider DMV.
The Roles Few Headlines Cover
Immigrants account for 40 percent of home health aides in the United States, one of the highest concentrations of any healthcare occupation. These roles sit at the foundation of elder care. They are also among the least recognized.
Employment for home health and personal care aides is expected to grow 21 percent from 2023 to 2033, with an average of roughly 719,000 job openings each year. The people absorbing that demand across the DMV are, in large numbers, African-born workers.
Research published in Health Affairs found that during the first two years of the pandemic, the share of immigrant certified nursing assistants in U.S. nursing homes surged as native-born staff numbers dropped. Staffing shortages would have been far worse without foreign-born CNAs staying in the workforce.
For many African workers in the region, these roles are entry points, not ceilings. A Cameroonian nursing assistant in Hyattsville today may hold an RN license in two years. A Nigerian home health aide may run her own care agency within a decade. That mobility happens at scale across the DMV.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce projects 193,100 registered nurse job openings annually through 2032, while domestic nursing schools are expected to produce far fewer graduates than that number over the entire decade.
Current immigration policies, including increased visa fees, tighter eligibility rules, and enforcement pressures on legally present workers, risk shrinking the very workforce the system depends on. Experts warn that restrictive policies intensify shortages rather than ease them.
No dedicated visa pathway exists for healthcare workers in roles that require an associate’s degree or postsecondary certification. The current system is, by most accounts, too slow and too complex to meet the demand it faces.
Meanwhile, the nurses, aides, and practitioners working overnight shifts across Prince George’s County and DC keep showing up. They do not wait for policy to catch up. They fill the gap with the credential, the shift, and the decade of sacrifice it took to get there.
They are not supplementing the healthcare system.
In much of the DMV, they are what keeps it running