There are approximately 372,710 Nigerian immigrants in the United States, approximately 7 percent of whom live in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area (27,570). The counties with the highest share of Nigerian-born immigrants as a percentage of the total county foreign-born population in the DC Metropolitan Area are Prince George’s County (8.2%) and Charles County, Maryland (6.1%). Approximately 25 percent of Nigerians in the DC Metropolitan Area work in service occupations and 20 percent work in healthcare practitioner and technical occupations.
Dr. Omoche Cheche Agada is an Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology in the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University. Dr. Agada was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. He completed his primary and secondary education in Lagos before going on to complete a bachelor’s degree at the University of Lagos. He moved to the United States in 2014 to pursue a master’s degree at Southern Arkansas University and eventually moved on to receive another master’s degree and a PhD from George Mason University. In August 2022, Dr. Agada started as an Assistant Professor at George Mason University after working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant while he was completing his degrees. His current research interests lie at the “intersection of Cybersecurity, Digital Forensics, Data Science, and Machine Learning.” Dr. Agada wishes that more people understood that the immigration system “is not as easy as people think it is” and that “it's difficult to turn back because sometimes when you leave [home], you don't leave anything behind and there's nothing much you have to return to.”