Finding the World in Loudoun County

"It's a diverse place, but in a way it's not," said Mustafa Omar, 39, a Somali who grew up in Libya and Rome and moved to South Riding by way of New York City and Annandale. "We're still a minority, let me be frank."

He will go to the pool sometimes and feel quite singular. On the other hand, Omar said, he was surprised to find any people with similar backgrounds all the way out in Loudoun. He had been driving to the District to play soccer but stopped once he found Skaer's team, which is as international as a United Nations team he once played with in New York's Central Park, he said.

"Now that life is a little more settled, I'm kind of planning my own kind of life in South Riding," he said. "Whether with work, family or a social group, things are falling into place slowly. It's kind of made me think maybe the U.S. is not a bad place."

Broadly speaking, the region's outer counties, such as Loudoun and Prince William in Virginia and Calvert and Charles in Maryland, have had larger proportional, if not numerical, increases in foreign-born residents than inner counties and the District over the past several years. In the outer counties, that population grew by at least 50,000, or 160 percent during the 1990s; in inner counties, it grew by at least 250,000, or 72 percent, according to a study, based on 2000 Census figures, by Audrey Singer, a visiting fellow with the Brookings Institution.

Many first-generation immigrants, such as Omar and Elabderrahmani, have followed the usual suburban pattern, moving from closer-in suburbs to outlying ones. But there are also growing Indian and Brazilian communities in South Riding, for instance, composed of people for whom the new development was their first stop in the United States, an increasingly common pattern here and elsewhere in the country, demographers say.

If it's a nice evening outside, Elabderrahmani said, "you'll see all kinds of people walking around the block -- that's how you know how diverse it is."

People see one another at block parties or Easter egg hunts, working in the yard or playing soccer in a field on a summer Tuesday evening.

Conversations about religion or culture become conversations about kids and real estate prices and the new deck out back. "They become something else," Branch said. "You lose sight of religion or where somebody's from, and it really comes down to a friendship that develops."