There is a moment that many Africans in the DMV describe the same way. You are driving through Hyattsville or Silver Spring or Bowie, and you pass a Nigerian restaurant next to a Ghanaian hair salon, next to an Ethiopian market, next to a Cameroonian church. And something clicks. This does not feel like a foreign country anymore. It feels like home with a different zip code.
That feeling is not accidental. It is the product of decades of migration, community building, political history, and economic gravity that have made Maryland one of the most significant African diaspora destinations in the United States.
Maryland is home to the fourth largest share of African immigrants in the country, a fact that Governor Wes Moore highlighted in September 2024 when he proclaimed the month as African Heritage Month, describing it as a moment to shine a light on the mosaic of the African diaspora and its rich presence in the state. That proclamation was not a symbolic gesture. It was a recognition of something the community has known for years: Maryland, and the Washington DMV region in particular, has become one of the most important African immigrant hubs in the Western world.
The question worth exploring is how it happened, why Maryland specifically, and what it means for the hundreds of thousands of African families who have built their lives here.
The Numbers Tell a Remarkable Story
Start with the raw data, because it is striking.
As of 2024, Maryland has a total population of 6,263,220, with 32 percent identifying as Black or African American, making it one of the most racially diverse states on the East Coast. But the African-born population within that figure is what sets Maryland apart from nearly every other state in the country.
According to the Governor’s office, 10 percent of Marylanders are African-born, and according to the George Mason University Institute for Immigration Research, Maryland holds the fourth-largest population of African immigrants in the United States. That figure places Maryland ahead of states with far larger overall populations, including Illinois, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
Nationally, approximately 2.5 million sub-Saharan African immigrants lived in the United States in 2024, more than triple the number in 2000, with most coming from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, or South Africa. Maryland captures a disproportionately large share of that population, and the concentration is even more remarkable at the county level.
The top counties for sub-Saharan Africans nationally are Harris County in Texas, Prince George’s County and Montgomery County in Maryland, Bronx County in New York, and Hennepin County in Minnesota, with these five counties together home to 14 percent of all sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States. Two of the top five spots belong to Maryland counties alone. That is not a coincidence. It is the result of a very specific set of historical, geographic, and social forces that have been pulling African families toward the DMV for more than sixty years.
How It Started: Diplomats, Students, and the 1960s
The story of Maryland’s African population does not begin with the immigration waves of the 1990s or 2000s. It goes back further, to the era of African independence.
Black African immigrants began arriving in the Washington D.C. area in the late 1950s and early 1960s as diplomats of newly independent African countries and as students, particularly at historically Black Howard University. Beginning in the 1980s, these early immigrants were joined by growing numbers of refugees, diversity visa holders, and other immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
That early diplomatic presence mattered enormously. Washington D.C. is the American capital, and for newly independent African nations establishing their embassies and consulates, the city was the natural landing point. African diplomats and international students formed the first layer of community infrastructure: churches, cultural associations, mutual aid networks, and informal information pipelines that would later guide entire generations of new arrivals toward the DMV specifically.
As Remi Duyile, an adjunct professor of finance at Bowie State University who was born in Nigeria and came to America in the early 1980s, put it, “Even though you’re far away from your country, your embassy represents you, your country. So that helps people to naturally gravitate towards the DMV area.”
That gravitational pull, once established, became self-reinforcing. Community members would encourage family and friends back home to follow them. Networks formed. Churches grew. Businesses opened. And the next wave of immigrants arrived not into a strange new place but into an existing African community that could absorb and support them.
The Laws That Changed Everything
Geography and community explain part of the story. Federal immigration policy explains the rest.
Two pieces of legislation in particular transformed the scale and character of African immigration to Maryland. The Refugee Act of 1980 opened the door for large numbers of Africans fleeing conflict, particularly from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 1983 and 2004, more than 12,000 sub-Saharan African refugees were settled in the Washington metropolitan area alone, with sub-Saharan Africans making up an increasingly large share of all refugees coming to the area: 11 percent in the 1980s, 30 percent in the 1990s, and 67 percent between 2000 and 2004. TANTV
Then came the Immigration Act of 1990, which created the Diversity Visa lottery program. The 1990 law created the Diversity Visa to bolster immigration from under-represented countries such as Cameroon and Chad, and also made it easier for highly skilled immigrants to come for work, opening the door to many educated workers and international students from countries including Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana.
The combination of refugee resettlement and diversity visa pathways created two distinct streams of African immigration into the DMV: one humanitarian and one professional. Both streams landed in Maryland, and both communities have since grown into deeply rooted institutions.
Why PG County and Montgomery County Above Everywhere Else
Within Maryland, the concentration of African immigrants in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County is remarkable enough to deserve its own explanation.
Prince George’s County is the most populous African American-majority county in the United States and the second most affluent, with a population that nearly reached one million residents in the 2020 census. For African immigrants, the county’s existing majority-Black population created a social environment where newcomers from Africa could integrate without navigating the hostility or isolation that characterizes the experience of Black immigrants in many other American cities.
Research shows that the areas with the highest percentage of African-born immigrants in Maryland are concentrated in and around the east, central, and north portions of Prince George’s County near the cities of Bowie, Landover, and Laurel, as well as the cities of Calverton, White Oak, Takoma Park, and Silver Spring within Montgomery County.
The two counties serve somewhat different segments of the African community. Four out of the five top birthplaces among African immigrants in Prince George’s County are West African countries, and there are notably higher rates of immigrants from Cameroon and Sierra Leone living in Prince George’s County at 31 percent compared to Montgomery County at 15 percent. Meanwhile, more than one-third of African immigrants living in Montgomery County were born in Ethiopia or Ghana.
In Montgomery County, West Africa is well-represented beyond Ethiopia, with the next largest groups coming from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Togo, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The result is that the two counties together form a remarkably complete representation of the African continent, not just one region or nationality.
Housing costs are also part of the answer. In Prince George’s County, immigrants made up more than 208,000 residents in 2019, comprising nearly 23 percent of the total population, with immigrants responsible for all recent net population growth in the county. Compared to the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Washington D.C. or the premium-priced suburbs of Fairfax County in Virginia, Prince George’s County offered something rare: affordability combined with proximity to the capital, good transit access, and an existing Black community infrastructure.
What Draws African Immigrants to Maryland Specifically
The reasons African families choose Maryland over other states with large immigrant populations are well-documented and remarkably consistent across research and community testimony.
Interviews with Black African immigrants in Washington revealed that the metropolitan area is attractive for four main reasons: its cosmopolitan nature including its racial diversity, its manageability especially compared with New York which was noted as too big and too expensive, its status as a center for international work, and its standing as the capital city which is viewed as the most important city in many African countries. Africans
The proximity to federal agencies, international organizations, universities, and healthcare systems also creates a labor market that is particularly well-suited to the skill profiles of African immigrants. Research by the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States have some college education, a figure six percentage points higher than the level for native-born Americans. Maryland’s economy, concentrated in government contracting, healthcare, biotechnology, and education, absorbs that talent in ways that rural or manufacturing-heavy states cannot.
Then there is the community factor, which may be the most powerful of all. As Prince George’s County Council member Wala Blegay described it, “People want to be among those that are their own. Some of them came here because they had family here, and their families encouraged them to come here. Many felt that this was a welcoming community. They started raising their kids here, and they started to tell others to come. So we have had a huge amount of African immigrants start to move here.”
That chain migration pattern, where one family’s success becomes the pull factor for the next family’s decision to emigrate, is one of the most powerful forces in demographic geography. Once a critical mass of Nigerians, Cameroonians, Ethiopians, Ghanaians, and Sierra Leoneans established themselves in PG and Montgomery counties, the community’s own gravity did the rest.
The Second Generation Is Changing Maryland’s Future
The story of the African population in Maryland is no longer just an immigration story. It is becoming a generational story.
As the community grows, its leaders note that it is only going to attract more first and second-generation immigrants from Africa, with younger people born in the DMV beginning to embrace their African heritage and building careers in corporate settings while staying connected to their roots.
The political representation of the community is also growing. Three members of the Prince George’s County Council now identify as part of the African diaspora. Council member Wala Blegay has noted that the census likely undercounts the African population significantly, estimating that perhaps 20 percent of the community is not properly counted because second-generation residents born in America are often not captured in African immigrant statistics.
That undercounting matters enormously. If Blegay’s estimate is close to accurate, the true size of the African diaspora community in Maryland, counting first-generation immigrants, second-generation children, and American-born family members, could be substantially larger than any official figure currently shows. Maryland may not just be the fourth-largest African immigrant state. It may be even more significant than the data currently reflects.
Governor Moore himself addressed the community’s full contributions during the African Heritage Month proclamation, celebrating African Marylanders who work constantly to make the state everything that it can be, even if Maryland was not the place of origin for them.
What the African Population Means for Maryland’s Economy
The African community is not simply a cultural presence in Maryland. It is an economic force.
The Maryland Comptroller’s office has noted that Maryland’s future population growth depends on immigration, and that with foreseeable declines in natural population growth and ongoing trends in domestic outmigration, a direct path for Maryland to grow its population is through international migration, which brings additional workers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and taxpayers.
Maryland welcomed 53,100 international migrants in 2024, representing the largest net international migration the state has recorded in recent years, with total net migration being the primary driving force behind Maryland’s population growth that year.
African immigrants are a significant part of that growth engine. In Prince George’s County, immigrants made up two-thirds of all workers in the construction industry and more than 39 percent of all healthcare and social assistance workers, accounting for more than one in four workers in manufacturing, retail, and professional services.
The African community in Maryland also drives a growing ecosystem of African-owned businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, beauty salons, financial services companies, and cultural institutions that circulate economic activity within the community and contribute to the broader county tax base. Every African grocery store, every Afrobeats promoter, every Nigerian catering company, and every Cameroonian-owned real estate firm represents economic output that did not exist a generation ago.
Maryland Is Just Getting Started
The growth of Maryland’s African population is not slowing down. If anything, the conditions that made Maryland attractive to African immigrants are strengthening. The federal government continues to grow. Howard University continues to draw African students. The community networks that have been built over six decades continue to pull new arrivals toward PG County and Montgomery County specifically.
Among the fastest-growing African immigrant groups nationally from 2010 to 2024 were Nigerians, whose numbers grew by 143 percent, Cameroonians at 142 percent, and Kenyans at 105 percent. All three communities are well-represented in Maryland, and all three are growing rapidly.
For Africans already in the DMV, this growth means more community infrastructure: more businesses, more cultural events, more political representation, more familiar faces in familiar places. For those considering where to build a life in America, Maryland makes a compelling case: a strong labor market, an existing African community large enough to feel like home, a governor who declared African Heritage Month, and two counties that rank among the top five African immigrant destinations in the entire country.
Maryland did not stumble into this. The African community built it, one family at a time, across more than sixty years. And it is still building.
