Egypt: Immigrant Stories
Egyptian Immigrants in the United States
According to the 2019–2023 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year dataset, an estimated 226,800 Egyptian immigrants live in the United States, representing 0.5 percent of the total immigrant population of 46,134,671. The top three states with the largest percentage of Egyptian immigrants as a percentage of the total foreign-born population include Tennessee (2.9%), New Jersey (1.5%), and West Virginia (1.3%).
The median age among Egyptian immigrants living in the United States is 43 years old and the median year of immigration to the United States for immigrants from Egypt is 2007. More than two-thirds (68%) of Egyptian immigrants are naturalized U.S. citizens and 68 percent of Egyptian immigrants are proficient in English. Egyptian immigrants have high employment rates (94%), and 12 percent are self-employed or business owners.
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DINA ABOU ZEID, an Egyptian documentary producer and director, spent nearly all of her life living in Cairo before moving to the United States in 2020. Born and raised in the city, Ms. Abou Zeid’s professional work in documentary film did not emerge suddenly. She was raised in a home shaped by journalism, intellectual life, and history. Her father was a physician, and her mother was a journalist at Al-Ahram, one of Egypt’s most prominent newspapers. Her mother’s family valued education and gender equality. Her mother and aunts were educated women with strong political views who worked in the journalistic field. On her father’s side, she describes a lineage connected to kheiyamia, a traditional textile craft in Egypt, one associated with ceremonial fabrics and historical forms of handwork that later received UNESCO recognition on the world heritage list. Her father, though less explicitly political, passed down to his children a deep attachment to Cairo’s history and heritage. Ms. Abou Zeid explains that through him she and her younger sister inherited what she called “a love of history and heritage.”