Pashtuns in the United States and Canada: refugees, numbers and community life

At a glance

• Nobody counts Pashtuns in the United States or Canada by ethnicity. The nearest figures are language counts: 22,760 Pashto speakers in the United States in the American Community Survey for 2009 to 2013, and 23,185 people with Pashto as a mother tongue in Canada's 2021 census. [1, 3]

• Most Pashtuns in North America came as refugees after the Soviet invasion of 1979. The United States took 2,000 to 4,000 Afghan refugees a year through the 1980s. [7]

• The largest Pashto-speaking populations are in California, New York and Virginia in the United States, and in the Toronto area in Canada. [2, 3]

• After the fall of Kabul in August 2021 the United States brought in more than 76,000 Afghans through Operation Allies Welcome, and Canada had welcomed more than 59,000 by October 2025. Neither count says how many are Pashtun. [4, 5]

• The community's own organisations, the Khyber Society in New York and the Pakhtoon American Community Association in Maryland and Virginia, say their work is to keep Pashto and Pashtun custom alive abroad. [8, 10, 12]

Pashtun Day on Coney Island Avenue

In November 2010 the Khyber Society held a "Pashtun Day" on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn, in the part of the city known as "little Pakistan". The society, which its president said was founded about 25 years earlier, speaks for Pashtun Americans in New York. Its leaders told members to keep practising Pashtun traditions. The evening ended with a folk music night, where the singer Sarfraz Affreedi (the spelling used by the reporter) sang and Taj Akbar, the society's president, and others danced. [10]

Akbar described a double bind. "The dilemma of the Pashtun American community," he said, "is that when we go to our motherland, Pakistan, especially to our area Khyber Pakhtonkhwa, people against America think, we are 'Americans' and when we come back to our adopted homeland, U.S.A., members of our community complain that they are treated as suspects upon the ports of entry." He said he had been stopped for extra checks so often that it could not be chance, and that the surname Khan, common among Pashtuns, was part of it. US Customs and Border Protection told the reporter it does not use racial profiling. [10]

Akbar also gave his community a history to stand on. "We are the followers of Bacha Khan and his philosophy of non violence," he told the crowd, and borrowed the line from the film My Name is Khan: "I am a Khan, I am not a terrorist." [10] On Bacha Khan, see Bacha Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar. His vice president, Sher Bahadar, named education as the way forward and said it was shameful that some who call themselves Pashtuns had burned girls' schools. [10]

The same report shows the other side of the immigrant story. Dr Rafiq Jan, a doctor from Hangu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said he was one of the first Pakistani immigrants to the United States, more than forty years before. For 18 years he went home to run an eye camp, where, he said, he did more than 8,000 cataract operations free and saw more than 80,000 patients. In 2010 officials in Hangu escorted him out, telling him extremists opposed to Americans could make him a target. [10] Akbar claimed almost 12,000 Pashtuns in the New York tri-state area, and the report notes that no statistics exist. [10]

The first arrivals

The Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America says the first Afghans in the United States probably came in the 1920s or 1930s. It records a group of 200 "Pushtuns" arriving in 1920, and adds that many of them were probably from British India. Early Afghan immigrants, it says, were upper-class, well educated and trained in a profession. [7]

Numbers stayed small. The entry counts about 230 Afghans immigrating between 1953 and the early 1970s, and 110 naturalised between 1973 and 1977, while Afghanistan's politics grew uncertain. [7]

After 1979: refugees in Fremont, New York, Washington and Toronto

The Soviet invasion changed the scale. From 1980 the United States admitted 2,000 to 4,000 Afghan refugees a year until 1989, and estimates of Afghan refugees in the country run from 45,000 to 75,000. After 1989 most newcomers came through family reunification, since a visa needed relatives or an organisation to guarantee support. Among those who arrived in the 1980s the largest groups went to New York, Washington, San Francisco and Toronto, and the entry estimates that more than half of all Afghan refugees in the United States lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. [7]

Fremont, in the Bay Area, became the best known. Judith Miller, writing in City Journal in December 2010, called it probably the largest Afghan enclave in the Western world. She gave Valerie J. Smith's account of two waves: from 1989 to 1993 mostly educated Kabul professionals and officials, and from the late 1990s many rural, poorly educated people, among them widows. The reasons people gave for choosing Fremont were mild weather, a landscape like home, word of mouth and cheaper housing than New York. Rona Popal, who left Afghanistan in 1977, told Miller: "It felt safe in this calm suburb." [9]

Miller wrote that an "overwhelming majority" of Fremont's refugees were Pashtun. That is her statement, not a count: the 2000 census had found 3,400 Afghans in Fremont and 12,000 in the Bay Area, figures that Afghans and experts she spoke to thought too low, and Smith estimated 30,000 Afghan refugees in northern California. [9] A short strip on Fremont Boulevard, "Little Kabul", had a grocery, a jeweller, a bookshop and clothes shops selling tunics, headscarves and pakol hats. [9] Mohammad Qayoumi, then president of Cal State East Bay, counted about ten mosques in the area, mostly Sunni, and divided the second generation into three kinds: those who speak only English, those who are bilingual, and those who speak only "pidgin Dari or Pashto". [9]

What the numbers say

The Census Bureau's detailed language tables for 2009 to 2013 count 22,760 people aged five and over who spoke Pashto at home, with a margin of error of 2,595. Of these, 9,840 said they spoke English less than "very well". [1] By state, California had 6,785, New York 5,025, Virginia 1,965 and New Jersey 1,085. [2] The same tables count 391,113 speakers of Persian, a category that includes Farsi and Dari. [1]

A language count misses Pashtuns who speak Dari, Urdu or English at home, and it says nothing about where families came from. The Khyber Society's figure of almost 12,000 Pashtuns in the New York region is a claim, and the tables count speakers in New York state (5,025) and New Jersey (1,085) on a different basis. [2, 10]

Canada asks for mother tongue. The 2021 census, taken before the evacuation, counted 23,185 people with Pashto as a first language, of whom 19,520 gave it as their only mother tongue. Ontario had 15,285 and the Toronto census metropolitan area 10,110. Alberta had 3,435 (Calgary 2,330), British Columbia 1,705, Quebec 1,630 and the Ottawa-Gatineau area 1,580. [3]

Keeping Pashto abroad

Pashtun associations in the United States put language first. The Pakhtoon American Community Association (PACA), a non-profit based in Maryland and Virginia, states that its "primary purpose" is "to promote the well-being of Pakhtoon Americans through service and support". Its objectives include preserving the Pashto language and heritage, helping with job searches and giving new immigrants English lessons and an orientation to American life. It says it is neither political nor religious. [8]

In 2012 the Pashtun community of North America held its first International Pashto Conference in Springfield, Virginia. The organisers' stated aim was to promote Pashto language and culture and to portray "the true face of the Pakhtun society", and the Pashto singer Sarfaraz Khan Afridi performed. [11] A second conference, organised by PACA in Springfield in 2013, ran for a day with speeches, a youth show, a mushaira (poetry gathering) and music. [12]

The speakers at the second conference said what they were worried about. Dr Razaul Hasan of PACA said: "We are discussing ways and means to keep the language and culture alive and to promote it." Qasim Yousafzai, who moderated, warned that "languages and cultures are disappearing from the world very fast". Jehangir Khattak of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism argued that Pashtuns should have media of their own, run and managed by them. The poet Rana Mohmand, from Afghanistan, spoke about the problems of Pashtun women and urged women to act alongside men. The youth show was children's poems and paintings, and a California-based singer, Engineer Mohmand, performed songs by classic Pashto poets. [12] For the poetry and songs, see Pashto literature and oral poetry and the rabab, the attan and Pashtun music.

2021: the evacuation

When Kabul fell in August 2021 evacuation flights carried tens of thousands of Afghans out of the country. On 19 February 2022 the Department of Homeland Security announced that the last evacuees had left Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst for new communities. It said about 84,600 Afghan nationals, American citizens and lawful permanent residents had arrived under Operation Allies Welcome, more than 76,000 of them Afghan nationals. [4]

The effort needed Pashto speakers at once. The Defense Language Institute reported that Pashto and Dari linguists were requested for the work. At Rhine Ordnance Barracks in Germany, one of eight US sites in Europe housing evacuees, a team led by Sergeant First Class Bobby Keeth had five military linguists and five to ten contractors for about 8,000 people. Staff Sergeant Heather Stock said: "We were translators, but we turned into social workers." Technical Sergeant Phil Rowe, a Pashto speaker, said of the evacuees: "For these people, hospitality is huge in their culture." [6] For the war and the earlier exodus, see the Soviet war and the refugees.

An Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada question period note of 2 October 2025 says it had welcomed more than 59,000 Afghans since August 2021. They came through special immigration measures for Afghans who had supported the Canadian government, a pathway for the extended families of former interpreters and cultural advisers, and a humanitarian programme for groups such as women leaders and religious and ethnic minorities. The exceptional measures and their funding ended on 31 March 2025. [5] The 2021 census predates these arrivals, so the Pashto count of 23,185 does not include them. [3]

For the larger picture of Pashtun migration and media, see Pashtuns today and, for labour migration to the Gulf, Pashtuns in the Gulf.