The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan area is home to over 6.3 million residents. The DC metro has nearly every regional ancestry group.
Maryland's Prince George's County is a majority Black county - home to a very large Sub-Saharan African community (specifically Nigerian migrants) and an even larger African-American community. Prince George's County is also home to a sizeable Central American community within the Beltway and around College Park, with large Salvadorian and Guatemalan populations. The Central American growth has crossed over the county line into Aspen Hill and Gaithersburg in neighboring Montgomery County.
Montgomery County is also home to a large East Asian Community that traverses the Potomac River into Virginia's Fairfax and Arlington counties. Unlike Montgomery County, Virginia has a much more diverse Asian Community with large Southeast Asian communities around Springfield and Annandale and areas close to Dulles Airport like Ashburn, Reston, and Brambleton.
The D.C. metro also has unique pockets of South American, Mexican, Middle East & North African, and Caribbean ancestries.
Maryland and Virginia have similar ancestral characteristics.
In Maryland, Baltimore is home to another diverse black community with African-American, Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan African ancestries. Meanwhile outside of Baltimore City and the areas surrounding D.C., the state is predominantly European. Outside of Maryland's two metro areas, the second largest ancestral group is almost uniformly African American, with smaller pockets of East and South Asian ancestry. There are some areas of the Eastern Maryland Panhandle that do not even meet the minimum population to report 2nd or 3rd place ancestries, meaning there are less than 22 people claiming a single non-European ancestry.
Outside of Northern Virginia, Virginia's next two largest metropolitan areas are Richmond and Hampton Roads. Virginia has large African American communities in the large metros along with smaller pockets of other minority groups. Outside of the metros, Virginia's population is primarily of European descent with African American typically making up the second largest ancestral group. There are small pockets of East Asian ancestry centered around Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There is a new, growing Mexican community emerging in the Shenandoah Valley.
Continue to explore the interesting trends seen throughout the state looking at the 2nd group or Group Percentages to go beyond the surface level 1st largest groups.
The image below depicts the countries classified within each regional group per the Census Bureau. There are two groups, Alaskan Native/American Indian Group and the African American, that are not shown on the map, despite their classification as "regional groups" in the interactive map.
