Albanians in America: A Community More Than 400,000 Strong

How many Albanians live in the United States?

More than 400,000 Americans are of Albanian descent, of whom more than 300,000 still carry an Albanian signal the census can see. Both figures are built from the ground up in the ledger at the end.

Here are the four current, official, federal counts of Albanians in the United States.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

228,504 ± 8,279 people told the American Community Survey they were of Albanian ancestry. 252,106 ± 8,977 wrote “Albanian” in the race question of the same survey in the same period — the largest Albanian figure that exists in any published US Census table. 236,635 is the 2020 Census full count, from the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File published on 21 September 2023: a complete enumeration rather than a sample, with a documented margin of error of three people. And 110,504 ± 5,099 is simply the number of US residents born in Albania — a fact about passports, not about identity.

None of these is wrong. They answer four different questions, and the gaps between them are the measurement of what each question misses. The race write-in exceeds the ancestry write-in by 10.3 percent in the same survey and the same period. The 2020 full count exceeded the contemporaneous survey estimate by 17 percent. That 10-to-17 percent wedge is the honest, empirical size of the ancestry question’s undercount — and it is nowhere near the fourfold multiplier that a figure of one million would require.

The number that does not exist

Ethnic Albanians reach the United States from Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, southern Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Italy. Only those born in Albania appear cleanly in the data. “Kosovo” has never once been a published line in the Census Bureau’s place-of-birth table — not in any release from 2009 to 2024. It only acquired a code in the public microdata in the 2017 survey. Montenegro has never had a line either. Everyone else sits inside a category called “Other Eastern Europe”, or under the Department of Homeland Security’s actual printed footnote, “Yugoslavia (unknown republic) prior to February 7, 2003.”

Dig into the microdata and they surface. In 2024 the United States contained 23,069 people born in Kosovo, 12,945 born in Montenegro, 29,937 born in North Macedonia and 29,131 who still write “Yugoslavia.” Seven in ten of the Kosovo-born report Albanian ancestry. So does more than a third of the Montenegro-born — in a country whose Albanian minority is about five percent of the population, because Montenegrin emigration to America comes overwhelmingly from Ulcinj, Tuzi, Plav and Gusinje.

In Germany and Austria, two-thirds of the emigrants from North Macedonia are Albanian. In America it is the reverse: of the 29,937 North Macedonia-born US residents, only 22.4 percent report Albanian ancestry and 59.9 percent report Macedonian.

Fivefold since 1990, and a plateau in the middle

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

In 1990 the census recorded 47,710 Albanian ancestries. In 2000 it was 113,661 — a rise so sharp that the Census Bureau flagged it in its own report, noting that a handful of small ancestry groups, Albanian among them, “at least doubled.”

Between the 2014 and 2018 survey estimates the count did not move at all — 191,021 to 191,264, a change of 0.1 percent over four years, well inside the margin of error. Albanian America went flat for the better part of six years, and only started climbing again in the 2020s.

Boston, 1886: the country that started in America

Albanian America is older than Albania. The first Albanian newspaper printed in the United States, Kombi, came off a press in a Boston cellar in June 1906. Dielli followed on 15 February 1909. The Pan-Albanian Federation of America, Vatra, was founded in Boston in 1912. Albania declared its independence at Vlora on 28 November of that same year. For a few years in the middle of all this, the most consequential Albanian institutions on earth were in Massachusetts.

The community remembers its own beginning in a blessing, recorded by fieldworkers in 1939: “Who opened America may his soul shine and shine; a fellow from Korcha and one from Katundi may their souls shine and shine.” The fellow from Korçë came in 1876 and left almost at once for Argentina. The one from Katundi stayed.

The man from Katundi

His name was Kolë Kristofori, and in America he became Nicholas Christopher. He settled in Massachusetts in 1886, peddled bananas, worked in factories, and went home again and again — each time bringing friends and relatives back with him, until, as the 1939 study puts it, the first ten Albanians in the United States all came from the same village. The dates in the sources look contradictory and are not: Kristofori arrived alone in the mid-1880s, returned to Albania, and came back in 1892 leading a party of sixteen or seventeen men from Katundi. In 1920 he broke with Fan Noli and founded a rival church in South Boston, on the charge that Noli had never been properly ordained.

By 1900 there were perhaps forty-two Albanians in the whole of Massachusetts. Within twenty years there were tens of thousands across New England — and the reason was the same one that shaped every other detail of their lives: mill work paid, and it did not ask for English.

Ten men to a flat

They came alone and meant to leave. The passage cost more than fifty dollars, so almost all of them borrowed it from the village money-lender — and since a 1907 US law barred labourers who arrived on borrowed money, they were coached at Ellis Island to swear the money was their own. Boys were taught to say a father had sent it, and strangers were hired to pose as the father. If the stranger could not identify his supposed son, the boy was deported.

The work was in the textile mills, the shoe factories and the metalworks: Boston and Worcester, New Bedford’s cotton mills, Hudson’s rubber works, and Southbridge, where the American Optical Company went looking for cheap labour and brought back a colony.

Ten or fifteen of them lived in a single flat called a konak. They knew what it was costing them — one of them, interviewed as an old man, said the konaks were “often no better than kolnets”, dog kennels, and another gave the whole generation its epitaph: “We wedded ourselves to folly, and thereby became fools.”

How a nation learned to read, out loud, in a Boston tenement

The Ottoman authorities had banned printing in Albanian. Most of the men in those flats had never seen their own language written down. So the konak became a school. The one literate man read the newspaper aloud — every line of every article, “often including casual notices and advertisements. Then a heated discussion would burst forth as the entire group wrangled over the interpretation of the news.” Bundles of books arrived from Romania, Bulgaria and Egypt: readers, patriotic verse, political pamphlets.

Kombi was produced by Sotir Peçi in a cellar at 100 Hudson Street. Dielli — “The Sun” — first appeared on 15 February 1909 and told its readers, four years before it happened, that “if Turkey is driven out of Europe, then Albania will become an independent nation ruled by some European prince.” Prince Wilhelm of Wied landed at Durrës on 7 March 1914.

Dielli is still publishing today, which makes it the oldest Albanian-language newspaper anywhere in the world — though not an unbroken one: it split into two rival papers, one in Boston and one in Detroit, after Vatra fractured in 1936.

The burial that founded a church

Orthodox Albanians in New England worshipped in Greek churches, where the clergy preached against the use of Albanian and treated anyone who wanted the Bible in Albanian as an enemy of Christ. In 1907 a young Albanian nationalist died of influenza in Hudson, Massachusetts, and no Greek priest would bury him. He was buried in a Worcester cemetery with no service at all. Later Albanian Orthodox tradition gives his name as Kristaq Dishnica; the contemporaneous account records the event without the name.

The response was to build a church. Fan Noli — born in Ottoman Thrace in 1882 — was ordained a deacon in New York on 9 February 1908 and a priest that March. On 22 March 1908, in the Knights of Honor hall at 730 Washington Street in Boston, he celebrated the first Orthodox liturgy ever said in the Albanian language, before a congregation the Boston Globe put at more than five hundred. As the 1939 study observes: “Never before, not even in Albania, had Albanians worshiped in an autocephalous church.”

The first purpose-built Albanian church in America was St Nicholas in Southbridge, dedicated on 16 May 1912. By 1939 there were six Albanian Orthodox churches in Massachusetts. Muslim Albanians, who came in numbers only after 1912, had none — “Whatever influence Islam exerted upon its Albanian followers in America was exercised informally.”

Vatra, and the loan a country raised in Boston

Vatra — “The Hearth” — was founded in Boston in 1912 by Noli and Faik Konica, and for the next decade it behaved less like a diaspora club than like a government in exile with a printing press. Three dollars a year bought membership and a subscription to Dielli.

In the fund drive of 1917–19, “the owner of a small variety store in Boston gave $500; two workmen in the Fore River Shipyards at Quincy contributed $360 each”. And in the late summer of 1920, when Albania’s minister of finance needed to raise his country’s national loan, he did not go to a bank. “He had to appear in Boston to float it through Vatra.” Albanian-Americans subscribed $222,900.

Paris, 1919

In January 1920 the Allied powers had a plan for Albania in writing: Shkodër to Yugoslavia, Korçë and Gjirokastër to Greece, Vlora and a mandate to Italy. Vatra had spent the previous two years lobbying Washington and arguing the Albanian case in Woodrow Wilson’s own vocabulary of self-determination.

What stopped the partition was an American refusal. It is fair to say Albanian-American lobbying helped produce it, and unfair to make Wilson a consistent friend of Albania — he had conceded Vlora to Italy in April 1919 and an Italian mandate that September. But the country survived 1920 intact, and the people who had argued hardest for it were mill hands in Massachusetts.

Noli went home. In June 1924 the Boston priest became prime minister of Albania; on Christmas Eve he was chased out by an army that included White Russian mercenaries. His own verdict, in a letter, is better than anything written about him since: “By insisting on the agrarian reforms I aroused the wrath of the landed aristocracy; by failing to carry them out I lost the support of the peasant masses.” He returned to Massachusetts, translated Shakespeare and Cervantes into Albanian, took a doctorate at Boston University at fifty-three, and died in Florida in 1965.

By then the door had closed behind him. The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 gave Albania 288 places a year — filled to the last one in fiscal 1923 — and the Immigration Act of 1924 cut it to the statutory minimum of a hundred, where it stayed for four decades. The founding generation of Albanian America was, for practical purposes, the last one until the 1990s.

The forty sealed years

Between the quota acts and the fall of communism, the United States admitted Albanians from Albania at a rate best measured in dozens. Twenty-two people in 1983. Thirty-two in 1984. Forty-five in 1985. Across the whole half-century, the entire anti-communist emigration — the men of Balli Kombëtar and Legaliteti, the dervishes, the imam who arrived by way of Cairo — amounts to about 1,400 people admitted in the 1950s and 1,950 in the 1960s. The generation that produced a government-in-waiting, a CIA paramilitary programme and half the institutions of Albanian America would not have filled a mid-sized theatre.

A government-in-waiting, and a war nobody won

The Free Albania National Committee was assembled in 1949 with American backing, and behind it sat Operation Valuable, known on the American side as Project Fiend: an Anglo-American programme to infiltrate armed Albanian émigrés into their own country and bring down Enver Hoxha. Most of them were captured. The story everyone tells is that Kim Philby betrayed them. The newest archival work, built on thousands of pages of declassified CIA files, says Philby’s role has been “widely overstated”, and that within six months Washington and London had quietly downgraded their aim from overthrowing Hoxha to merely harassing him, and did not tell the Albanians. Families in New York, Boston and the camps went on sending sons.

The voice

What actually reached Albania was the Voice of America. For four decades Zëri i Amerikës was the most trusted sound in the Albanian language. On 22 June 1991, three hundred thousand people packed Skanderbeg Square in Tirana to hear the American Secretary of State. What came over the loudspeakers was not James Baker’s voice but that of his translator — Elez Biberaj, an ethnic Albanian from Montenegro who had reached America at fifteen and spent the previous decade broadcasting into that country on shortwave. Albania’s future ambassador to Washington remembered it as “the sound of history.”

The wave that carried a Yugoslav passport

In 1990 the United States contained 5,627 people born in Albania — and 13,608 foreign-born people who spoke Albanian at home. Over the 1980s the first number fell by a quarter while the second rose by two-fifths. The community was becoming more Albanian and less Albania-born at the same time.

The newcomers were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, from western Macedonia — Debar, Struga, Tetovo, Gostivar — and from the Montenegrin coast around Ulcinj, Plav and Gusinje. In American law they were not refugees. Non-aligned Yugoslavia did not qualify: in the entire decade 1981–1990, exactly 324 people born in Yugoslavia were granted permanent residence in the United States as refugees or asylees, against 18,762 admitted as ordinary immigrants and 72,306 Soviet-born people admitted as refugees.

That single legal fact produced the whole economic sociology of Albanian New York and Albanian Detroit. There was no resettlement agency, no caseworker, no apartment found for you. There was a cousin with a spare room and a job that came with one.

Supers, pizzerias and the Bronx

In New York the job was superintendent. Many Albanians had reached America through Italian refugee camps, so the Bronx acquired something no other immigrant group could offer: a supply of Italian-speaking building supers who could talk to Italian landlords. Sali Nezaj arrived in 1970, moved in with cousins, worked construction while his wife cleaned Manhattan offices at night, and in 1984 bought a nineteen-family apartment house at Bainbridge Avenue and 198th Street. By 1992 he owned four buildings and was coaching his own supers — a Jordanian and a Puerto Rican — to do the same. Another super, Peter Mrnaci, used to tease his landlord: “One day, I’ll own this building.” He bought it. The landlord became his tenant.

The capital came from each other. Rexh Xhakli, a Bronx realtor, lent Albanians he barely knew as much as $80,000 on a handshake and no interest. His explanation was one sentence: “You don’t charge a brother interest.” And the manager of the Bronx Albanian newspaper offered the shortest available account of why any of them were there: “After each war, the side that doesn’t win comes to America.”

Michigan, 1954: a farm, seventeen men, and ten letters from Tirana

In 1953 seventeen Albanian men in Detroit pledged money to build the first Bektashi teqe in the Western hemisphere for Baba Rexheb, a Sufi cleric who had reached Michigan by way of displaced-persons camps and Egypt. Then the letters started arriving from communist Albania, warning the men that their relatives at home would suffer if they went ahead. Ten of the seventeen withdrew. The remaining seven bought an eighteen-acre farm from a German-American family in Taylor, Michigan, and opened the teqe there in the spring of 1954. When an East Coast Albanian paper then attacked Baba Rexheb’s wartime record, the community closed around him instead.

Hoxha’s reach also ran into the church: when Fan Noli died in March 1965, his successor as bishop in Boston was consecrated by the communist-influenced synod in Albania, and it took until 14 October 1971 for most of the American parishes to break away into the Orthodox Church in America.

What the paperwork cannot show is what the sealed border cost individual families. Halil Bushka reached Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1954 with seven children. His wife Haxhire and their youngest son were left behind in an internment camp in Albania. Haxhire was released in 1990.

1981, and the moment the American community became political

Student demonstrations in Pristina in the spring of 1981 changed the status of Albanians inside Yugoslavia overnight. One researcher working in the opened Croatian secret-police archives found that before 1981 there were about eight Albanians in the files; within a few years there were thousands. A protest that began over canteen food turned an entire nationality into a security category.

In the United States the effect was to make Albanian America organise across lines it had never crossed before. In 1981 a Catholic priest, a Sunni imam and a Bektashi baba jointly mobilised their congregations in Detroit for rallies in Washington and New York.

And in July 1990, a folklore professor from the University of Pristina brought the Kosovo blood-feud reconciliation movement to Pelham Parkway. “The time has come for us to all shake hands,” Anton Çetta told the families of the Bronx, “because the blood feuds have destroyed the Albanian nation.” In one week ten oaths of revenge were retracted and twelve feuds quelled. Then he went on to Detroit. A Bronx printer’s verdict: “The only comparison I can make is to Gandhi.”

The lottery that built a community

In the summer of 1990, thousands of Albanians climbed the walls of the foreign embassies in Tirana, and the regime that had sealed the country for forty-five years began to come apart. The exodus that followed did not go to America. In fiscal year 1990, seventy-eight people born in Albania obtained United States permanent residence. In 1991, 142.

America opened four years later, and it opened by lottery.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

Why Albania won a lottery it had not entered

The Immigration Act of 1990 created the Diversity Visa: fifty-five thousand green cards a year, drawn at random, reserved for countries that had sent few immigrants to the United States over the previous five years. Albania qualified spectacularly — precisely because Enver Hoxha had spent four and a half decades making it impossible to leave.

Albanians then played the lottery harder than almost anyone on earth. In the registration period for DV-2018, 367,231 entries were submitted from Albania. The country’s entire population is under three million. In one autumn, the equivalent of 12.8 percent of Albania put its name into a draw for an American green card.

It is often said that Albania leads the world on this. It does not, quite: on entries per head in DV-2019 it ranked fourth, at 11.6 percent, behind Moldova, Sierra Leone and Liberia. What is genuinely singular is the gap inside the Albanian nation. In the same year, entry rates ran at 11.6 percent in Albania, 3.1 percent in Kosovo, 1.7 percent in North Macedonia and 0.5 percent in Montenegro. Albanians in Albania played at nearly four times the rate of Albanians in Kosovo — because Kosovo in that decade had European doors open to it that Albania did not.

The results are the reason modern Albanian America exists. Between fiscal 1995 and 2016, natives of Albania took 44,806 diversity visas — more than all but Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt and Ukraine, each an enormously larger country. Per head of population, no large recipient on earth came close. In fiscal 1996 the lottery supplied 60 percent of all Albanian green cards. In 1998, 80.6 percent. In fiscal 2000, 3,909 of the 4,756 Albania-born people who became permanent residents — 82 percent — had won a draw.

By fiscal 2024 the lottery’s share was down to 24 percent, and that fall is the best single measure of how far the community has come: the winners of the 1990s are now American citizens petitioning for their relatives. Fifty-seven percent of the 2024 cohort came in as immediate family of a US citizen.

The other doors

Not everyone waited for a draw. Albania was briefly a refugee-sending country in its own right in the early 1990s, and the collapse of the pyramid schemes in 1997 produced a wave of asylum claims rather than a wave of boats. Students came, and stayed: the Department of Homeland Security’s overstay report puts the fiscal 2023 overstay rate for Albanian students and exchange visitors at 8.07 percent, against 1.15 percent for all in-scope travellers worldwide.

Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia are not in the Visa Waiver Program: every tourist and business visitor sits a consular interview. That has not stopped the traffic. In fiscal 2024 Albanian nationals were admitted to the United States 31,580 times — an all-time record, more than triple the 9,990 of fiscal 2015.

And the migration did not end with the Kosovo war, whatever the received story says. Of the foreign-born Albanian Americans alive in the United States today, more arrived in the 2010s than in any other decade — 38,831, against 33,955 in the 2000s and 32,113 in the 1990s.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

Becoming American

Albanians naturalise fast. 81,064 people born in Albania became United States citizens between fiscal 1987 and fiscal 2024, and 96.7 percent of them did so from 2000 onward. The record year was 2010, with 5,088; 2022 was close behind at 4,607. Among foreign-born Albanian Americans, 70.5 percent hold US citizenship, against roughly 53 percent for the foreign-born population as a whole.

One rule changed in April 2026. A State Department final rule effective 10 April 2026 generally requires diversity-visa entrants to hold a valid passport and upload a scan of it, with limited exemptions for people who are stateless or unable to obtain a passport — a response to the 2.5 million fraudulent entries the Department says it found in DV-2025. The last time a passport requirement was in force, Albanian entries fell by 30 percent in a single year.

Kosovo, and what Albanian America did about it

Joseph DioGuardi, Republican of New York, was the first Albanian-American ever elected to the United States Congress, and there has not been another since — thirty-seven years and counting. He convened the first congressional hearing on Kosovo in 1987, and in January 1989, the month he left the House, he founded the Albanian American Civic League.

He was the son of an Italian immigrant from Greci, in the province of Avellino — an Arbëresh village settled by Albanians who left the Balkans in the fifteenth century.

Money, guns and volunteers

When the war came in 1998, the community did three things.

It raised money, through the fund known as Vendlindja Thërret — “Homeland Calling” — passed round restaurants, clubs and parish halls from the Bronx to Sterling Heights. It armed part of the Kosovo Liberation Army: Florin Krasniqi, a Kosovar roofing contractor in Brooklyn, set up legally affiliated gun clubs in the United States and Albania, bought high-powered rifles lawfully across America and exported them lawfully to Albania, from where they were carried across the border.

And it sent men. Several hundred Albanian-Americans — most accounts say around four hundred — flew out on a chartered aircraft by way of Ireland and Italy to train with the KLA at a camp near Burrel in northern Albania. Among them: a taxi driver from Stamford, Connecticut; a senior at John Jay College in Manhattan; a pizzeria co-owner from Yonkers with three children. The recruiters turned people away. “Some did not have the proper documents. Some were illegally in the US, or their cases were still pending.” Only the men who had already won their immigration case could afford to go and fight.

The State Department never designated the KLA a foreign terrorist organisation — the original list, effective 8 October 1997, contains thirty organisations and no Kosovo entity; what happened is that an American envoy called the KLA “without any question, a terrorist group” in February 1998 and had to walk it back a month later. But thirteen years after NATO went to war on the KLA’s behalf, the Secretary of Homeland Security still had to sign a formal determination, effective 10 July 2012, exempting from the terrorism-related grounds of inadmissibility anyone who had “solicited funds” for, or “provided material support to,” the KLA. Until that document was signed, every Albanian-American who had passed a hat in a Bronx restaurant was, on the face of the statute, inadmissible to the country that had fought the war.

Fort Dix, 1999

In May 1999 the United States began flying Kosovar refugees out of Macedonia. Over roughly ten weeks, 4,045 people were brought into McGuire Air Force Base and processed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in an operation named Provide Refuge, run by the Public Health Service under the Office of Refugee Resettlement with screening by the International Organization for Migration in Skopje. The legal basis was a single sentence signed by Bill Clinton on 12 August 1999: “an unforeseen refugee emergency exists in Europe.” The determination lifted the year’s refugee ceiling from 78,000 to 91,000. In fiscal 1999, one in six of every refugee the United States admitted was chargeable to Serbia and Montenegro, and about 13,000 came in under the Kosovo emergency allocation itself.

The first baby born to the refugees at Fort Dix was named Amerikan; he flew to Dallas the following week with twenty-four relatives, to a family member who had offered to sponsor the whole group. And a man whose mother had died on the flight over told the base commander: “I’m only sorry my mother didn’t live three days longer, so she could have experienced the kindness of America.”

The airlift shows up in the statistics three years late and under the wrong name. In fiscal 2002, 10,401 people recorded as born in “Yugoslavia” were admitted to permanent residence — and 8,556 of them, 82 percent, were refugee and asylee adjustments.

Statues are easier to build than relationships are to keep

Kosovo declared independence on 17 February 2008 and the United States recognised it the next day. The relationship was then made physical in a way no other American alliance quite is: a Bill Clinton Boulevard in Pristina with a three-and-a-half-metre gilded statue unveiled on 1 November 2009, a street named for George W. Bush, and a boutique called Hillary.

It has not stayed simple. On 12 September 2025 the US Embassy in Pristina announced it had indefinitely suspended its planned Strategic Dialogue with Kosovo. And in 2026 the most visible Albanian-American political activity in New York has been a run of weekly protests outside Albania’s own consulate and UN mission in support of the Flamingo Revolution.

The political weight, measured

The Congressional Albanian Issues Caucus is co-chaired by four members, none of them Albanian: Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jim Himes of Connecticut and Lisa McClain of Michigan — which is, in three cases out of four, simply a map of where the Albanians live. Two congressional districts carry a visible Albanian bloc: NY-11, Staten Island and south Brooklyn, at 1.68 percent Albanian ancestry, and MI-10, Macomb County, at 1.35 percent.

Below Congress the picture is livelier. Ardian Zika — born in Kosovo in 1980, arrived in the United States at seventeen on a refugee visa in 1997 — was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 2018 with 60 percent of the vote and served two terms.

And when Albania held its first postal vote from abroad in May 2025, the United States ranked fourth among diaspora electorates: 20,648 registered voters, 8.4 percent of the overseas total, behind Italy, Greece and Germany. Overseas Albanians turned out at 82.2 percent, against 42.2 percent inside Albania — and they backed the governing Socialists by 61.1 percent to 23.5, nine points more strongly than voters at home. The assumption that people who leave vote against the people who made them leave did not survive contact with the ballot box.

Where Albanian America lives

Four states hold more than half of it. New York has 56,959 people of Albanian ancestry, Michigan 26,598, Massachusetts 21,625 and New Jersey 18,304. But headcount hides the more interesting pattern, which is density. By share of population the most Albanian states are Massachusetts (0.307 percent), Connecticut (0.299) and New York (0.287); the most Albanian large metro in America is not New York (0.34 percent) but Detroit (0.56 percent); and the single most Albanian metropolitan area of any size is Waterbury–Shelton, Connecticut, at 0.90 percent.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

New York: the Bronx has the reputation, Staten Island has the density

The New York metropolitan area holds 68,240 people of Albanian ancestry — three in every ten Albanian Americans. Queens has the largest count (9,655), the Bronx is second (8,828), and Staten Island, with 8,651, is 1.75 percent Albanian — the highest share of any county in the United States, nearly three times the Bronx’s 0.63.

Morris Park is the most Albanian neighbourhood in New York City at 5.85 percent. The most Albanian census tract in America is Bronx Tract 330 — Allerton, just north of Pelham Parkway between Bronx Park East and Williamsbridge Road — where 16.8 percent of residents report Albanian ancestry. Walk two blocks south into Morris Park’s Tract 248 and it is 14.1 percent. Two ZIP codes tie for the most Albanian in the country at 7.59 percent each: 10704 in north Yonkers and 01602 on Worcester’s West Side.

What people call Little Albania is really two places. The residential spine is Lydig Avenue in the Pelham Parkway belt, described by the Columbia Journalism School’s Bronx newsroom in 2011 as “an eclectic blend of Albanian pizzerias and bakeries, kosher Russian butchers, and small European markets.” The commercial spine is Arthur Avenue and the streets around it in Belmont — inside the Bronx’s Little Italy. Çka ka Qëllu is in the Michelin Guide and was one of three Bronx restaurants on the New York Times’ 2024 list of the hundred best in the city.

The succession happened in plain sight. Mujo Rugova, who left Plav in Montenegro in 1984 and was caught crossing the Mexican border, built three European food markets and a warehouse, and put the whole cycle in one sentence: “We used to take the working day jobs in those restaurants under its authentic Italian management, and now we own them. Now the Mexicans and the Caribbeans are doing these jobs for us, and who knows? Maybe they will become the next owners of the Italian restaurants in the Bronx.”

And the Bronx is now losing Albanians to Westchester. Across three consecutive survey vintages the Bronx has gone 10,317 → 9,546 → 8,828 while Westchester has gone 7,878 → 7,917 → 8,932. The church moved first: the Albanian Catholic parish left 4221 Park Avenue in the Bronx for Hartsdale, where Cardinal O’Connor consecrated the new Our Lady of Shkodra on 25 April 1999.

Michigan: a community that moved ten miles and left nothing behind

Macomb County, at 1.38 percent, is the most Albanian sizeable county outside New York City, and Sterling Heights — 3,804 people, 2.85 percent of the city — is the most Albanian city in America on any measure that is both large and statistically firm.

Compare the 2000 census with today and you can watch a whole community move north-east up the Van Dyke corridor. Hamtramck went from 635 Albanians to 26 — a 96 percent collapse. Warren fell from 1,053 to 202, the city of Detroit from 334 to 154. Over the same years Sterling Heights rose 66 percent, Troy 156 percent, Westland 248 percent and St Clair Shores by five hundred percent.

Michigan also has the most balanced origin mix in the country — roughly half from Albania proper, a fifth from North Macedonia, and a large Kosovo and Montenegro component hidden inside the census category “Other Eastern Europe.” Metro Detroit’s Albanians run the Coney Island hot-dog restaurants the way the Bronx’s run the pizzerias.

One frequently repeated claim does not survive contact with the data. Metro Detroit is not “the world’s largest concentration of Albanians outside Europe” — the New York metro has 68,240 to Detroit’s 24,575. Detroit is the most Albanian large metro per head.

Worcester, Waterbury, Garfield

Worcester city is 1.92 percent Albanian. The oldest Albanian congregation in the United States is there: organised in 1911, chartered as St Mary’s Assumption in 1915, and housed from 1918 in a building on Wellington Street designed as a replica of St George in Korçë. Its liturgy today is about two-thirds English.

Massachusetts is also the purest Albania-proper community in America: Worcester city has 2,410 residents born in Albania and zero born in North Macedonia. Modern Albanian Massachusetts has moved off the old mill map — Southbridge and Natick barely register now — onto the South Shore (Quincy is up 359 percent since 2000) and the North Shore.

Albanians came to the Brass City for wartime factory work before the First World War, and a Waterbury local historian, working from 1919 sources, puts the city third in the country that year for Muslim Albanians — about three hundred, behind Philadelphia’s 450 and Biddeford and Saco, Maine’s 400. Today the measured Albanian-ancestry population of the city is 2,131. In 2000 it was 2,174. In 2008 the city’s mayor told the local paper that Waterbury had “around 15,000” Albanians. The gap between the mayor’s figure and the census figure is a factor of seven.

New Jersey is the fastest-growing large Albanian state — up 150 percent since 2000. Garfield, at 3.63 percent, is the most Albanian city in America by point estimate, and it is one of a handful of places where residents born in North Macedonia outnumber those born in Albania — 779 to 704 on the published table, a margin too small for the two to be told apart with confidence, and one the microdata does not reproduce. Paterson, which turns up in almost every list of Albanian American cities, has 94.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

And everywhere else

Chicago holds 14,515 in its metro, with a distinctly Macedonian-Albanian character and a mosque in Berkeley, Illinois whose board, by its own constitution, “is made up of representatives from each village that has at least 30 members.” Florida is now fifth among the states, at 17,470, and rising. There is a colony in Rocky River, Ohio, which is 3.03 percent Albanian.

Meanwhile whole older colonies have emptied. Bridgeport, Connecticut went from 386 to 79. Ansonia, from 208 to 32. Lakewood, Ohio from 593 to 269. Boise from 275 to 51. El Cajon, California from 208 to 5. Albanian America has doubled since 2000 and simultaneously abandoned half the places it used to live in.

Four faiths, one community

Nobody knows the religious composition of Albanian America, and nobody can: the United States census has been forbidden to ask about religion on a mandatory basis since 1976. What can be documented is the institutions.

Ferid Murad, the only Albanian-American to win a Nobel Prize, described his own family: “my father was Muslim, my mother Baptist and we were raised in a Catholic community… I was baptized Episcopalian in college. My wife of more than forty years is Presbyterian, two of our daughters married Jewish men and one married a Catholic man.”

Orthodox: the church that a refused burial built

The oldest institution in Albanian America began, as the founding chapter describes, with a body nobody would bury. Fan Noli’s liturgy of 22 March 1908 produced the Albanian Orthodox Church in America, and its cathedral is St George, at 517 East Broadway in South Boston. Its archdiocese, now part of the Orthodox Church in America, has eleven parishes, in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and nowhere else.

Half a mile away, at 245 D Street, stands a second Albanian Orthodox headquarters, and the reason it exists is on the record in a declassified State Department report from 1950. The purpose of consecrating a rival Albanian bishop was, in the department’s own words, “to offset the harmful influence among the Albanian community of Bishop Fan Noli, who is of communist leanings.” In 2020 it reported two parishes, 800 adherents and about 160 people in church on an ordinary Sunday — the smallest active Eastern Orthodox jurisdiction in the United States.

Sunni: a mosque in Detroit, and a bowling alley in Brooklyn

Muslim Albanians came to America in numbers only after 1912. There were attempts — a Waterbury mosque in 1919 that the local historian who found it says left “very little information” and was gone by the 1930s — but the 1939 study of the community recorded flatly that “Moslem Albanians in America neither built nor attended any mosques.”

That changed in Detroit. The Albanian-American Moslem Society was organised there in November 1945; it brought Imam Vehbi Ismail over from Egypt in April 1949, and two years after that the members bought an old church on Hamilton Avenue and converted it into a mosque — the first Albanian mosque in Detroit, and the one the community’s own history calls the first in the country. The purpose-built Albanian Islamic Center at Harper Woods, Michigan, designed by an American architect with a Balkan-Ottoman dome and minaret, had its grand opening on 3 November 1963. Harper Woods is often called the first Albanian mosque in America. It is the oldest surviving purpose-built one; the Hamilton Avenue mosque was twelve years earlier and a good deal humbler.

New York’s came later and is best captured by the New York Times report of its opening in November 1972: Albanian Muslims of New York and New Jersey took over a converted mansion in Flatbush, in what the paper described as a predominantly Jewish and Italian neighbourhood, with no minaret — and “the bowling alley in the basement of the mansion has not yet, as planned, been converted into a dining room.” Staten Island’s Albanian Islamic Cultural Center on Victory Boulevard followed.

Bektashi: the first teqe in the Western hemisphere

The Bektashi order — the Sufi tradition that Albania has made peculiarly its own — reached America through one man and a Michigan farm, as the Cold War chapter describes. Because Tirana would not recognise the new teqe, Baba Rexheb took his spiritual authorisation from the Kaygusuz teqe in Cairo instead. The order’s own history records that the building went up with the help of “bektashe believers, Christians and Sunni” together.

Seven decades later, on 22 September 2024, the Prime Minister of Albania stood at the United Nations in New York and proposed to grant the Bektashi order a sovereign state of its own inside Tirana.

Catholic: the Bronx, Hartsdale, and an archbishop from Westchester

Albanian Catholics — overwhelmingly from Kosovo, Montenegro and the northern highlands — arrived with the Yugoslav wave. On 13 April 1970 the New York Times ran a story headlined “Hemisphere’s First Albanian Catholic Church Opens in the Bronx.” The building was 4221 Park Avenue. In 1989 Cardinal John O’Connor erected the first Albanian Catholic parish in the United States there, and in 1999 the congregation followed its people out of the Bronx to Hartsdale in Westchester, where Our Lady of Shkodra stands today.

Its first pastor was Rrok Mirdita, a parish priest from the Bronx and Westchester who in December 1992 was named Archbishop of Tiranë–Durrës and consecrated by John Paul II the following April.

Mother Teresa received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in the Rose Garden on 20 June 1985.

What the coexistence actually looks like

Albanians say of themselves that the religion of the Albanian is Albanianism — a line written around 1878 by Pashko Vasa, a Catholic in Ottoman service. So here is the evidence.

• When Detroit’s Albanian Christians founded St Thomas Orthodox Church in 1929, the city’s Albanian Muslims helped them with the mortgage.
• Imam Vehbi Ismail, interviewed in 1995, on how his mosque got built: “the Albanian Islamic Center was constructed with the support of both the Muslims and the Orthodox … Bishop Noli himself donated $500, and we have also contributed for the constructions of Albanian Orthodox churches … We are all Albanians and children of the same God.”
• In 1981, a Catholic priest, a Sunni imam and a Bektashi baba jointly mobilised their Detroit congregations for the Kosovo rallies in Washington and New York.
• In 2013 the President of Albania decorated all four Detroit Albanian houses of worship — two Catholic churches, a Sunni mosque and a Bektashi teqe — on the same day.

A member of St Thomas, interviewed in 1995, described how the joint Flag Day events run by a mixed Orthodox-Muslim benevolent society came to an end: the society dissolved amid political factions, and Michigan’s Albanians stopped commemorating their national day as one community. The coexistence was real. So was the Cold War.

Work, money and the road home

Albanian-American households earn a median of $102,000 a year against an American median of $81,604 — and individual Albanian Americans earn less than the national median. Both are true, and the explanation is the whole economic story in one line: the households are bigger (3.05 people against about 2.5) and they have more earners in them. Poverty runs at 7.5 percent against the American 12.1. Forty percent of Albanian Americans over twenty-five hold a bachelor’s degree, against 36.8 percent nationally.

There is one glaring exception, and it should be said before the success story. Elderly poverty among Albanian Americans is 13.4 percent — well above the community’s own rate and above the American figure. The grandparents came late, on family visas, without American work histories, and they are by a wide margin the poorest slice of the community.

The buildings

The most striking economic fact about Albanian New York has a date on it. When Co-op City opened in 1973 and the Bronx economy fell apart, property values collapsed so far that landlords began handing buildings to their own superintendents for five to twenty thousand dollars over the outstanding mortgage. The Albanians were the superintendents.

In August 1979 the New York Times found Nikoll Vataj, thirty-six, who had gone from porter on the Upper East Side to superintendent to the owner of six buildings and 550 apartments in seven years. His explanation for why he started was four words long: “If I work as a porter always, I will be poor my whole life.” His account of what he was buying was blunter — “Every Albanian who bought a building bought it when it was completely destroyed.”

The pizzerias, and the name on the awning

The other New York niche was Italian food, and the succession is documented from both sides. In 2001 a supplier to seven hundred New York pizzerias told the Times: “The Italians can’t do the work anymore, they’ve gotten fat in America. You go into an Italian restaurant now, you see Albanians. You think they’re Italian. They speak Italian, they look like us, the food is great.”

The Albanians agreed, and hid. Gjergj Dedvukaj bought Giovanni’s on Arthur Avenue and changed neither the name nor the menu, because “customers don’t know Albanian food.” One family put their mother Roze on a jar of marinara sauce as “Mamma Rosa” and wrote in the company brochure that the family had made the pilgrimage from Italy to America, with Albania unmentioned. One of the brothers said why: “I’m not sure I like the idea of advertising the fact that we’re Albanian. It’s a touchy situation.”

Twenty-five years later, Ramiz Kukaj runs four restaurants called Çka Ka Qëllu — the name is Albanian, the food is Albanian, one of them is in the Michelin Guide, and one was on the New York Times’ list of the hundred best restaurants in the city. That arc, from “Mamma Rosa” to an Albanian phrase on the awning in Belmont, is the clearest measure of what changed in a generation.

The Boston version came earlier and got further. Anthony Athanas, an Albanian immigrant, built Anthony’s Pier 4 into one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the United States.

The trucks

Every account of Albanian Detroit mentions trucking and none of them proves it. The microdata does. Nationally, Albanian Americans work in truck transportation at nearly twice the rate of all employed Americans — 2.24 percent against 1.16 — and in Michigan they turn up at roughly seven times the national rate. All nine of the Albanian-ancestry Michiganders the survey caught in the industry are self-employed. Nationally, 78 percent of Albanian-ancestry people working in truck transportation work for themselves, against 21.9 percent of everyone else in the industry.

That is the Michigan pattern in general: one in four employed Albanian Americans in Michigan is self-employed, against one in twelve in New York. Detroit’s Albanians did not become employees of the car industry. They bought trucks, and Coney Island hot-dog restaurants, and drove them themselves.

One generation, out of the kitchen

Set the newest arrivals beside the American-born and you can see the ladder, rung by rung, in a single table.

By the second generation, the share of Albanian Americans working in kitchens is below the American average.

Ilir Sela, whose family comes from Debar, founded Slice — the company that now handles ordering and payments for a large share of America’s independent pizzerias. A community that took over New York’s pizza shops one at a time in the 1980s produced the software that runs them.

The money that goes home

Here is the sentence that reframes the economic relationship between the United States and Albania: America’s biggest export to Albania is Albanians.

In 2021 the United States sold Albania $97.9 million of goods. In the same year Albanian Americans sent home an estimated $129.96 million. For Kosovo the gap is wider: $46.1 million of American exports in 2024, against roughly €100 million in remittances.

The United States is the third-largest source of remittances for both countries — behind Germany and Switzerland in Kosovo’s case, and at almost exactly the same share of each: about 7.6 percent for Albania and 7.4 for Kosovo. Kosovo’s central bank has published it quarterly since 2015.

Where the money lands has changed. In the second quarter of 2025, foreign direct investment into Kosovo ran at €231.5 million, up 32 percent — and 80.8 percent of it went into real estate, driven by diaspora demand.

And the biggest Albanian-American institution of all

In 1995 USAID capitalised a new corporation called the Albanian-American Enterprise Fund with $30 million under the SEED Act. The fund built Albania’s first Western-style bank, handed $15 million back to the United States Treasury in January 2011, and endowed a successor foundation with $152,129,702 — which peaked at $224 million and has since committed at least $109 million to twenty-eight named projects in Albania.

Which means the richest thing in the world with “Albanian-American” in its name is not a family, a firm or a foundation the community built. It is a line item of American foreign policy — and half of it has already been paid back.

The organisations that hold it together

Albanian America has more institutions per head than almost any comparable community, and almost all of them are small. The numbers below are all from public filings and the organisations’ own records rather than from their press material.

Vatra, and the paper that outlived everything

The Pan-Albanian Federation of America was founded in Boston in 1912 by Fan Noli and Faik Konica. For a decade it functioned as something close to a government in exile: it lobbied Woodrow Wilson, it argued Albania’s case at Versailles, and in 1920 it floated the Albanian state’s national loan among mill hands in Massachusetts.

It is still here. In June 2026 it re-elected its president — by 22 votes to 8 to 4, from a total of 34 delegates. Its Queens chapter filed a federal return showing $2,960 in revenue, all of it membership dues, and $814 in assets. And its founding city, Boston, had to have its chapter re-founded in 2024.

Dielli, however, is still publishing — the oldest Albanian-language newspaper anywhere in the world, founded on 15 February 1909, though not an unbroken one. The Bronx paper Illyria, founded in 1991, carried the Kosovo generation.

The voice that stopped

For forty years under communism, the most trusted sound in the Albanian language was Zëri i Amerikës, the Voice of America’s Albanian service — listened to illegally, at low volume, by people who could be jailed for it. It has been silent since 15 March 2025, when all Voice of America programming was suspended under executive order. Albanian was one of forty-nine languages; only a handful have been restored, and Albanian is not among them. The website is still up, and every story in it is from March 2025.

A funding bill signed on 3 February 2026 provides $199.5 million for the Voice of America in the 2026 fiscal year. The money came back. The Albanian did not.

The lobby, and where the money actually is

The Albanian American Civic League, founded by Joseph DioGuardi in January 1989, is credited across the Balkans with shaping American policy on Kosovo, and it says on its website that it speaks for 750,000 Albanian Americans. Its most recent federal return reports total revenue of $52,230, expenses of $45,417 and year-end assets of $14,807. It has twenty-nine board members, a volunteer president and a PO box in Ossining, New York: the influence on Kosovo it is credited with was won on those sums, by volunteers. That is how the community’s institutions are financed, and the League is the rule rather than the exception.

Meanwhile the two richest institutions with “Albanian-American” in their names were created by act of Congress and spend their money in Albania. The Albanian-American Enterprise Fund, established under the SEED Act of 1989, holds about $82.8 million; its legacy body, the Albanian-American Development Foundation, reported $216 million in assets in 2018. Together, roughly $300 million — against community organisations running on four and five figures. Both are chaired by an American appointed to the Fund’s board by President Clinton.

Thirty-one schools, almost none of which owns a classroom

The Albanian government’s own register lists 31 Albanian-language school sites in the United States, operating under 21 school names, across nine states. Thirteen of them are in New York alone — 42 percent of every Albanian school site in the country.

Almost none of them owns the room it teaches in; they rent American civic space at weekends. They are called Fol Shqip — Speak Albanian — and Mëso Shqip — Learn Albanian — and Udha e shkronjave, the Road of Letters.

The largest of them opened on Staten Island in April 2022 with about fifty pupils and now reports between two hundred and two hundred and forty. It is run jointly by three associations — Kraja, Ana e Malit and Ulqini — all named for Albanian communities on the Montenegrin coast.

Nobody knows how many children attend Albanian school in America. Neither Tirana nor Pristina publishes a figure; Kosovo’s education ministry has itself said publicly that it needs a database with the exact number of teachers and students abroad. What is documented is the freight: when Albania shipped 3,595 free textbooks to ten countries in September 2021, the embassy in Washington received 1,080 of them — the largest single consignment in the batch.

Two flags, five posts

Albania maintains exactly two diplomatic posts in the United States: the embassy on S Street in Washington and a consulate on East 79th Street in New York. Kosovo maintains three — Washington, New York, and Des Moines, Iowa.

Kosovo has the smaller diaspora and seventeen years of statehood. The Des Moines consulate exists because of the Iowa National Guard’s long partnership with the Kosovo Security Force, not because of where Albanians live.

The calendar

The community’s biggest street event is not on Independence Day. The Albanian Roots Parade runs in Manhattan in June — 21 June 2025, 20 June 2026. Independence Day itself, 28 November, is marked with flag-raisings: at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan, at the Michaelian Office Building in White Plains for Westchester County, and across the Detroit suburbs. The Governor of Michigan has issued an official Albanian Independence Day proclamation every year since at least 2019.

And the community plays football at each other. FC Ulqini plays out of Staten Island and went 8–2 with 32 goals in the spring 2026 season. In Michigan, Duka FC plays in the same league as Drita SC, another Albanian-named club, at a suburban Detroit sports dome.

The oldest Albanian organisation in America may not be Vatra, and may not be Albanian in the way anyone expects. The Contessa Entellina Society of New Orleans, a mutual-aid society formed by Arbëreshë immigrants from a five-hundred-year-old Albanian village in Sicily, gives its founding date as 1886 — twenty-six years before the Pan-Albanian Federation, and in Louisiana. That date rests on directory listings and the society’s own account of itself; it could not be checked against Louisiana incorporation records, and stands as a claim rather than a documented fact.

The people

Four claims get confused constantly in this territory, so this page keeps them apart: being born in Albania, being an ethnic Albanian, being Albanian-American, and being an Albanian who worked in America. Everyone below has been checked against a primary or reference source; where the evidence is thin, that is stated rather than glossed over.

The strongest single figure nobody counts

Gjon Mili was born in Korçë in 1904, raised in Romania, and came to America to study electrical engineering at MIT. In 1937 he met Harold Edgerton, who had built the stroboscopic light, and began photographing motion at a hundred-thousandth of a second for LIFE. He photographed Picasso drawing in the air with a penlight. He photographed Billie Holiday at the late-night jazz sessions he hosted himself. The plaque in his New York studio read: ALL THE WORLD’S A CAMERA. LOOK PLEASANT, PLEASE. His own summary of what the strobe gave him is the best sentence any Albanian-American has said about their own work: “Time could truly be made to stand still. Texture could be retained despite sudden violent movement.”

He also directed Jammin’ the Blues for Warner Bros. in 1944, a nine-minute jazz short with Lester Young — nominated for an Academy Award and, in 1995, selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. A boy from Korçë made a film the Library of Congress protects. There is no free photograph of him anywhere; the only way to picture him is the stamp Albania issued in 2008, in a series honouring Albanian-Americans, alongside John Belushi.

A Nobel Prize, a Space Shuttle and the world’s largest seed round

Ferid Murad shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that nitric oxide acts as a signalling molecule in the cardiovascular system. He wrote his own account of where he came from, and it is worth quoting because it contains the single best sentence in this whole story about what America did to Albanian names. His father, an ethnic Albanian born in 1892 — Murad wrote simply “in Albania”, while Albanian sources place the family in Gostivar, in today’s North Macedonia — was a shepherd who ran away from home to sell candy across the Balkans, had less than a year of schooling and learned seven languages. “The immigration officer at Ellis Island, August, 1913, asked his name, after which the officer declared him to be John Murad and stamped his papers.” Eighty-five years later his son won a Nobel Prize under the name the clerk gave him. Murad grew up in four rooms behind his parents’ 28-seat restaurant in Whiting, Indiana, and trained his memory by totting up every customer’s bill before they reached the register.

Lieutenant Colonel William G. Gregory was born in Lockport, New York in 1957, flew F-111s, went through test pilot school, joined NASA’s thirteenth astronaut group, and piloted the Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-67 in March 1995 — sixteen days and fifteen hours, the longest flight Endeavour ever made. The Encyclopedia of New York State records that he was baptised at St Elia, the first Albanian Orthodox church in the state. Not Boston, not the Bronx, not Detroit: a small upstate parish that also produced an astronaut.

And the most consequential living Albanian-American is almost certainly Mira Murati, born in Vlorë in 1988, who left Albania at sixteen on a scholarship, studied at Dartmouth, worked on Tesla’s Model X, and became Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI — and, for three days in November 2023, its interim Chief Executive. In February 2025 she founded Thinking Machines Lab, which raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation, the largest seed round in history. Among the investors was the Government of Albania, which put in $10 million and had to amend its state budget to do it.

Screen, stage and the Belushis

Most readers assume the usual immigrant arithmetic — one Albanian grandparent somewhere. John and Jim Belushi are Albanian on both sides: a father who left the village of Qytezë in Korçë country in the mid-1930s and ran a restaurant on North Avenue in Chicago, and a mother born in Ohio to immigrants from Korçë. When the President of Albania decorated Jim Belushi in Tirana in November 2008, Belushi gave the line that this whole page could be titled with: “I was born and raised in America, but my genes are Albanian.”

And the buried one. Nexhmie Zaimi, born in Libohovë in 1917, was one of the first six girls in Albania to attend a secondary school, run by American Presbyterian missionaries. She came to the United States, wrote, and became a foreign correspondent. Her story is the least-told in Albanian America and one of the best.

The music

Two of the biggest pop voices in the United States are the daughters of Albanian immigrants.

Ava Max’s own description of her Albanian is the most honest single line about second-generation language in this whole story: she speaks it but cannot read it. Behind her and Bebe Rexha sits a working layer that Albanian readers know and American ones do not: Njomza, whose writing credits reach the top of the Billboard chart, and Unikkatil, arguably the most culturally significant Albanian-American musician no American has heard of.

Public service

The community’s political history has a correction in it that nobody has made. Mark Gjonaj was the first Albanian-American elected in New York State, and the first on the New York City Council. He was not the first in America. Louis V. Mato, born in Pogradec in 1903, a chef-supply salesman and restaurant owner living in Fairchild, Wisconsin, sat in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1963 to 1971 — four terms, half a century before Albany, and nobody remembers him.

And the best arc of them all belongs to a judge. Emin Toro was born in Tirana in 1974. A Florida minister doing mission work at an Albanian orphanage needed an interpreter; Toro was chosen, and the minister brought him back to America for college. He went to Palm Beach Atlantic, then law school at North Carolina, then clerked for a judge on the DC Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court of the United States. On 1 August 2019 the Senate confirmed him to the United States Tax Court by voice vote, for a fifteen-year term.

Sport

In September 1991 the United States beat Jamaica 1–0, and the only goal was scored by a man born in Vusanje, a village above Gusinje in the Montenegrin mountains. Sadri Gjonbalaj moved to Brooklyn as a child, played at North Carolina State, and won five caps for the US national team.

Andy Varipapa, born in an Arbëresh village in Calabria in 1891 and brought to Brooklyn at twelve, became the most famous trick bowler in the world; a two-game finish that totals exactly 300 is still called a Varipapa 300.

The other clock

American Albanianness runs on two clocks. One starts in the 1890s with the steamships out of Korçë. The other has been running since the fifteenth century.

The Arbëreshë are the Albanian-speaking communities that fled the Ottoman advance into southern Italy from the 1400s onward. They reached America from Italy, with Italian surnames and Catholic parishes, and America has read them as Italian ever since. Joseph DioGuardi’s father emigrated from Greci, in the province of Avellino — an Arbëresh village of about eight hundred people, the only surviving linguistic minority in Campania. A man whose ancestors left Albania in the fifteenth century became the most effective Albanian lobbyist in twentieth-century Washington. His daughter, the songwriter and American Idol judge Kara DioGuardi, is Arbëreshe too.

So is the novelist Tom Perrotta, whose mother was, in his words to the Guardian, an Albanian-Italian — “that made her a second-class Italian” — and the rock critic and biographer Nick Tosches, whose grandparents were Arbëreshë from Casalvecchio di Puglia. The Albanian American Civic League has also long said that Regis Philbin’s mother came from Greci; that claim rests on the League’s own event footage rather than on a biography, and this page reports it as what it is.

The trope, and the record

No page about Albanians in America is honest without this paragraph. Taken (2008) cost $25 million, took $226.8 million worldwide, and did more to fix Albanians in the American imagination than a century of migration. Liam Neeson was menaced by Albanians again in Run All Night in 2015. In 2019 the Albanian government made a tourism advertisement called “Be Taken by Albania” and invited him to come and see the country.

Behind the trope sits one real case. United States v. Ivezaj, decided by the Second Circuit in 2009, describes the Rudaj Organization as “a violent Albanian racketeering organization based in New York City and Westchester County” which took gambling clubs in Astoria from the Lucchese family. Six men appealed; the convictions were affirmed. Two of the six appellants were Italian-American, the victims were Greek, and the property at issue was illegal gambling.

That is the documented core of “the Albanian mafia in America.” There is no American crime statistic for Albanian-Americans, because no American dataset has ever had a field for it — the same absence that runs through every other number here, arriving here in a form that happens to work in the community’s favour.

Language, marriage and the next generation

Albanian America is young. Its median age at the 2020 census was 34.7 against an American 38.8, and only 10.8 percent of it is over sixty-five, against 16.8 percent of the country. Twenty-three percent of it is under eighteen. That is not the profile of a settled ethnic group; it is the profile of a community still arriving.

The language is outlasting the label

184,704 people speak Albanian at home in the United States. That figure has grown 38 percent since the last time the Census Bureau published a detailed language table, in 2013 — while the ancestry count grew about 19 percent over a comparable span. The language is being reported more faithfully than the identity.

It is also being reinforced from outside. 41.3 percent of Albanian speakers in America still speak English less than “very well” — a share that has barely moved since 2013, when it was 43.9. That does not happen in a community that is assimilating on a normal curve. It happens in a community that keeps being replenished by new arrivals, which, as the arrivals chart shows, is exactly what has been going on.

Nearly a quarter of Albanian speakers in America — 42,463 people — were born in the United States. So the language is reaching the second generation. What is not reaching them is the census box: only 40.5 percent of self-declared Albanian-ancestry Americans are US-born. Ava Max, whose parents came from two villages on the Albanian Riviera, gave the most exact description of where the second generation actually stands: she speaks Albanian but cannot read it.

The Census Bureau’s standard language table lists forty-two languages by name, including Serbo-Croatian. Albanian is not one of them — it is folded into a residual category called “Other Indo-European languages”, despite there being more Albanian speakers in the United States than speakers of several languages that do get a line. Every “current” Albanian-speaker figure quoted from a Census table is thirteen years old.

Two Albanias, two dialects, two coasts

The community is split down a line that runs through the Albanian language itself. The founding migration — Massachusetts, Worcester, the mill towns — was Orthodox and Tosk, from Korçë and the south. The migration that built modern Albanian America — the Bronx, Staten Island, metro Detroit, Waterbury — is overwhelmingly Gheg, from Kosovo, western North Macedonia and the Montenegrin coast. A 1992 account of the Bronx colony noted the pattern already: the Bronx was Gheg; the Tosks had gravitated to Manhattan and Queens.

Worcester has 2,410 residents born in Albania and zero born in North Macedonia. Garfield, New Jersey has more Macedonia-born residents than Albania-born. Chicago’s Albanian community is substantially Macedonian in origin. These are not variations on one migration. They are two different migration systems that happen to speak the same language, and in America they mostly live in different states.

Marriage, and the visas that carry it

Eighty-two percent of Albanian Americans report Albanian ancestry and nothing else. For a European-origin group in the United States that is extraordinary — German- and Irish-ancestry Americans are overwhelmingly multiple-ancestry, the arithmetic of a century of intermarriage. Albanian America has not done that yet.

Part of the reason is that marriage still crosses the Atlantic. In fiscal 2024 the United States issued 150 fiancé visas to Albanians and 120 to Kosovars — small numbers against the community’s size, but a steady annual current of people marrying back into the home country.

There is a stranger visa line that says as much about Albanian-American life as any of the big ones. In fiscal 2024, 100 Albanians entered the United States on P-3 visas — the category for “artists or entertainers in culturally unique programs.” That is the folk ensembles, the valle troupes and the wedding singers, flown in for the season.

The generation nobody counts

The most consequential thing happening to Albanian America right now is not visible in any published statistic. 35,546 children and grandchildren live in Albanian households in the United States and appear in no Albanian statistic at all. Nearly all of them were born here; 23,889 are under eighteen. They do not report Albanian ancestry, they do not speak Albanian at home, and they were not born in Albania or Kosovo. Asked what they were, more than nineteen thousand of them left the question blank, and the rest wrote American, Irish, Italian, German.

That is not a measurement problem to be corrected away. It is the second generation, in a census file, in the act of becoming something else — and it is why every Albanian institution in this country, from the Saturday schools in rented public-school classrooms to the parade in June, exists in the form it does.

How Albanians in America connect today

Every other page in this series describes a diaspora you can drive across. Albanians in Greece live a bus ride from Kakavia; Albanians in Italy can be in Vlora by ferry before dinner. Albanian America is different in a way that changes everything about how people meet: it is spread across a continent, and the parts of it are further from each other than any of them is from Albania.

The top five metropolitan areas hold 57 percent of Albanian America, and the rest is spread thin across the country in clusters that fall away fast: Worcester’s 5,885, Tampa’s 5,283, Jacksonville’s 5,153, Waterbury’s 4,079, and then down through states that count their Albanians in the hundreds. Staten Island is 1.75 percent Albanian. California is 0.013 percent. An Albanian family in Phoenix, in Charlotte, in Naples, Florida, is four flying hours from the nearest neighbourhood where the language is spoken on the street.

The cousin network, and where it stops

For a century this community met itself the way the Bronx of the 1980s did: through the village association, the parish hall, the wedding, the cousin with a spare room. Those networks are dense — they moved people across an ocean, financed buildings on handshakes and settled blood feuds in a week — but they have edges, and in America the edges arrive fast.

Only 40.5 percent of Albanian Americans were born in the United States, which sounds like a community still tightly wound around the first generation — until you notice that the US-born share is rising, that the median age is 36, and that the second generation is doing exactly what every American second generation does: moving to the suburb, the sunbelt, the job. The Bronx has lost Albanians to Westchester. Hamtramck lost 96 percent of its Albanians to the far side of Macomb County. Bridgeport, Ansonia, Lakewood and Paterson have effectively emptied.

And the community remains overwhelmingly endogamous by intention rather than by circumstance. Eighty-two percent of Albanian Americans report Albanian ancestry and nothing else — a single-ancestry share far above almost any other European-origin group in America, and the statistical signature of a young community that has not yet married out. What it has not got is a way of meeting people at the scale of the country it lives in.

The problem is practical rather than cultural. The panel below sets out what a search conducted nationally, rather than within one neighbourhood, has produced for Albanians in the United States.

A practical directory

Everything below was checked against the organisation’s own published record in August 2026. Where an entry rests on a community directory rather than an institutional source, it says so.

Consulates and embassies

These five are the complete list of Albanian and Kosovar state representation in the United States. Several commercial visa sites also advertise Albanian honorary consulates in Detroit, Boston, New Orleans and Stamford; none of them appears in the Albanian foreign ministry’s own mission directory, and at least one names a consul who has died. Do not rely on them.

Churches, mosques and the teqe

• Cathedral of St George, 517 East Broadway, South Boston, MA — seat of the Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese in America (Orthodox Church in America), which has eleven parishes across six states.
• Albanian Orthodox Diocese of America (Ecumenical Patriarchate), 245 D Street, South Boston, MA — the other Albanian Orthodox jurisdiction, four blocks away.
• Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 535 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA — the oldest Albanian congregation in the United States, organised 1911.
• St Thomas Albanian Orthodox Church, 29150 Ten Mile Road, Farmington Hills, MI — established in Detroit in 1929.
• Our Lady of Shkodra, 361 West Hartsdale Avenue, Hartsdale, NY — the first Albanian Catholic parish in the United States, erected in the Bronx in 1989 and consecrated in Westchester in 1999.
• Our Lady of the Albanians, 29350 Lahser Road, Southfield, MI, and St Paul Albanian Catholic Church, 344 Auburn Road, Rochester, MI.
• Albanian Islamic Center, 19775 Harper Avenue, Harper Woods, MI — opened 3 November 1963, successor to the converted-church mosque Detroit’s Albanians opened on Hamilton Avenue in 1951.
• Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, 307 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY.
• Albanian American Muslim Community, 38 Raymond Street, Waterbury, CT.
• First Albanian Bektashi Teqe in America, 71749 North Line Road, Taylor, MI — the first Bektashi house in the Western hemisphere, founded 1954. The türbe is open daily.

Albanian schools

The Albanian government’s register lists 31 sites under 21 school names, in New York (13), Michigan, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey and Florida. A representative sample:

• Shkolla shqipe “Mëso Shqip” — I.S. R002 George L. Egbert, 333 Midland Avenue, Staten Island, NY (the largest, 200–240 pupils).
• Shkolla shqipe në Bronx — Christopher Columbus High School, 925 Astor Avenue, and MS 80, Mosholu Parkway East.
• “Hasan Prishtina” — 106 Columbia Boulevard, Waterbury, CT; “Shqiponjat” — 233 South Elm Street, Waterbury.
• Shkolla shqipe në Michigan — 1451 East Big Beaver Road, Troy, MI; “Nënë Tereza” — 29350 Lahser Road, Southfield, MI.
• “Besa” — 100 William T. Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA; “Iliria” — Arlington and Beverly, MA.
• Shkolla shqipe Naples — 16165 Learning Lane, Naples, FL.

Organisations, media and events

• Vatra — the Pan-Albanian Federation of America (founded Boston, 1912) and its newspaper Dielli (founded 1909), the oldest Albanian-language newspaper in the world.
• Albanian American Civic League (founded 1989), Ossining, NY — the Kosovo lobby.
• Albanian American National Organization, founded in Worcester in 1946.
• Illyria, the Albanian-American newspaper founded in the Bronx in 1991; Albanian TV of America, Troy, Michigan.
• Zëri i Amerikës — the Voice of America’s Albanian service, silent since 15 March 2025.
• The Albanian Roots Parade, Manhattan, in June — assembling at 81st Street and Central Park West.
• Independence Day, 28 November — flag-raisings at Bowling Green in Manhattan, at the Michaelian Office Building in White Plains, and across metro Detroit.

Where to eat, in the Bronx

Addresses below are as published in the community’s own business directory.

• Çka ka Qëllu, 2321 Hughes Avenue — Albanian name, Albanian food, Michelin Guide.
• Gurra Cafe, 2325 Arthur Avenue.
• Dukagjini Burek, 758 Lydig Avenue — on the residential spine of Pelham Parkway.
• EuroAlb Market, 2326 Arthur Avenue — the grocery pictured above.

The two-total ledger: how the total is built

The four questions set out at the top of this page — birthplace, ancestry, the race write-in, language at home — are all the United States asks, and not one of them is a count of ethnic Albanians. This section shows how two different totals are built from those four answers: more than 400,000 Americans of Albanian descent, and the more than 300,000 of them who still carry a signal the census can see.

Swipe horizontally to explore the full chart.

The arithmetic in full view

Two features of that table matter more than the total. The first is that the two big blocks are measured, not modelled: they come from the 2024 American Community Survey microdata, on one frame, linked at household level. The second is that more people are thrown out of this model than are estimated into it. Fifty-seven thousand spouses, partners, in-laws and housemates are excluded; four thousand are added.

The finding inside the ledger

35,546 children and grandchildren live in Albanian households in the United States and appear in no Albanian statistic whatsoever. 34,636 of them were born in the United States, and 23,889 are under eighteen. Asked what their ancestry was, 19,498 of them wrote nothing at all. The next most common answers were “American”, Irish, Italian, German — and, further down, Macedonian and Montenegrin.

That is what assimilation looks like in a census file, and it is the single strongest argument that the published ancestry number is too low.

The generation the census lost

The blocks above count people the American statistical system can still see. They do not count the great-grandchildren of the mill towns, and for a page called “Albanians in America” that is an evasion, so here is the arithmetic.

The scholarly estimate puts the Albanian-American community at 40,000 to 60,000 in 1945, a figure that already includes American-born children. Grow that stock at the rate the American population itself grew between then and now — from 140 million to 342 million — and it has something like 110,000 to 160,000 living descendants today. Very few of them are in the measured blocks: only 5,820 living foreign-born Albanian Americans arrived before 1980, so the old stock contributes perhaps 15,000 to 30,000 of the people currently reporting Albanian ancestry. The net addition is roughly 110,000, and it takes the descent-based total to about 425,000.

This is the weakest block on the page and it is labelled accordingly: a projection off a scholarly range, not a measurement. It is also the reason the two figures in the ledger are both worth having. If you want to know how many Americans a census, a survey or a consulate can find, the answer is more than 300,000. If you want to know how many Americans descend from the Albanian migration, the answer is more than 400,000 — and the difference between them is one of the largest quiet facts in this whole story.

Three independent checks

The ballot. In 2025 Albania held its first election with postal voting from abroad. 20,648 people in the United States registered; 20,646 ballots were sent; 17,244 came back. Measured against the Albania-born population of each country, the registration rate was 22 percent in Italy, 20 in Germany, 18 in Greece — and 17 percent in the United States. For the American Albanian population to be a million, that same registration would have to represent a rate of about 2 percent, one-tenth of Germany’s. The comparison is not proof: only Albanian citizens could register, which excludes Kosovar, Macedonian and Montenegrin Albanians by design, and long-settled Albanian Americans are less likely to hold current Albanian papers than recent arrivals in Italy. But it points one way.

The naturalisations. The United States has naturalised 81,064 people born in Albania since 1987. The 2024 survey finds essentially all of them still resident. There is no room in that record for a hidden community four times its size.

The two questions. In the same survey and the same period, the race write-in exceeds the ancestry write-in by 10.3 percent. In 2020 the full count exceeded the contemporaneous survey estimate by 17 percent. That 10-to-17 percent wedge is the only defensible uplift factor the evidence supports for the living population, and it is nowhere near fourfold.

What is deliberately left out

• Everyone who married in. Counting the 49,261 spouses, partners, in-laws and non-Albanian heads of mixed households would push the household universe to 374,947, and it would be counting the wrong thing.
• The Arbëreshë, and the Albanians of Turkey. Unbounded and unmeasurable. Not counted.

What people say, and where it comes from

The Albanian American Civic League says on its website that it speaks for 750,000 Albanian Americans. The National Albanian Registry puts it at “closer to a million.”

Neither is presented by its authors as a count, and neither is dishonest. They are advocacy figures, and advocacy figures answer the question how many people does this community speak for, not how many people did the census find. But the habit is old and stable enough to be measured. In 1980 the standard reference work put the community at around 70,000 against 7,381 people born in Albania. In 1990 it was 75,000–150,000 against a census count of 47,710. Today it is 750,000 against 228,504. At every date for a century the community estimate has run at three to ten times the census figure, and the ratio has barely moved. That is not evidence. It is a habit.

Measures that must never be mixed

Almost every disagreement about the size of Albanian America is definitional. Five different things get called “the number of Albanians in America”, and this page keeps them apart:

1. Self-reported ancestry — a voluntary write-in, up to two per person, never imputed. 228,504 ± 8,279.
2. Detailed race write-in — a different question elsewhere on the form. 236,635 in the 2020 full count; 252,106 ± 8,977 in the current survey.
3. Country of birth — says nothing about ethnicity, and has never had a Kosovo line. 110,504 ± 5,099 born in Albania.
4. Language spoken at home — persons aged five and over; it excludes the English-speaking second and third generation. 184,704.
5. Descent — everyone with an Albanian ancestor. Nobody measures this. It is what the community figures are reaching for.

On the Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece pages, the visible baseline is a sum of several official rows. Here it is a single row — because “Kosovar”, “Montenegrin Albanian” and “ethnic Albanian” do not exist as published American categories at all. The absence is not a gap in the research. It is the finding.

For citation, use the number that matches the question. Use 252,106 for the largest current figure in a published Census table; use about 315,000 for people with a living Albanian signal; and use more than 400,000 for Americans of Albanian descent. If a source cannot say which of those questions it is answering, it should not quote the number.