Wikipedia Deep Dive

Somali diaspora

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Two Million People, Scattered Across the World

In the Somali language, they call themselves Qurbajoogta—those who live abroad. It's a single word that captures something enormous: nearly two million people who trace their roots to the Horn of Africa but now call dozens of different countries home.

That number deserves to sink in. Two million.

To put it in perspective, that's roughly the population of Houston, Texas, or Vienna, Austria—except instead of living in one city, these two million people are spread across every inhabited continent on Earth. You'll find Somali communities in the frozen cities of Scandinavia and the humid townships of South Africa. In the suburbs of Minneapolis and the bustling markets of Dubai. In refugee camps in Kenya and university halls in London.

The War That Changed Everything

The Somali diaspora existed before 1991, but it was small. Sailors who settled in British port cities in the late 1800s. Traders who moved to Egypt. Students pursuing education in Sudan. Businesspeople establishing themselves in the Gulf states.

Then the civil war began.

What happened in Somalia starting in the early 1990s ranks among the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the late twentieth century. The central government collapsed entirely—not partially, not weakened, but completely dissolved. Clan-based militias fought for control of a country that had essentially ceased to exist as a functioning state. Famine killed hundreds of thousands. The capital, Mogadishu, became synonymous with chaos and violence.

People fled. They fled in enormous numbers, by any means available, to anywhere that would take them.

The vast majority went to neighboring countries first. This is how refugee movements typically work—you don't book a flight to Sweden when bombs are falling on your neighborhood. You walk, or you drive, or you crowd onto a boat, and you go to the nearest safe place you can reach.

For Somalis, that meant Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Yemen. Even today, roughly two-thirds of all Somalis living outside Somalia remain in these neighboring countries. Kenya alone hosts over 300,000 Somali refugees. Ethiopia has about 255,000.

The Distinction That Matters

Here's something that makes counting the Somali diaspora surprisingly complicated: the difference between ethnic Somalis and citizens of the country called Somalia.

These are not the same thing.

The borders drawn by European colonial powers in the nineteenth century split the Somali people across five different territories. Italian Somaliland and British Somaliland eventually merged to form modern Somalia. But there were also Somalis in French Somaliland (now Djibouti), in the Ogaden region (now part of Ethiopia), and in the Northern Frontier District (now part of Kenya).

This means there are millions of ethnic Somalis who have never held Somali citizenship because their families have lived for generations in what is now Ethiopia or Kenya. When researchers try to count the diaspora, they often conflate these two different things—people who left the country of Somalia versus people who are ethnically Somali but may have left from somewhere else entirely.

The practical effect is that diaspora estimates vary wildly. Official United Nations figures suggest about two million people from Somalia live abroad. But the total number of ethnic Somalis outside their traditional homeland could be significantly higher.

Europe's Unexpected Somali Communities

If you'd told someone in 1980 that one of the largest Somali communities in the world would be in Minnesota, they'd have thought you were joking. The same goes for the idea of tens of thousands of Somalis in Finland, a Nordic country about as geographically and culturally distant from the Horn of Africa as you can get.

Yet here we are.

The United Kingdom hosts the largest Somali community in Europe—about 108,000 people as of 2018. This makes sense historically. Britain controlled northern Somalia for decades, and Somali sailors had been settling in British port cities since the Victorian era. Cities like Liverpool, Cardiff, and Bristol have had Somali neighborhoods for over a century.

But the newer communities are more surprising. Sweden has over 66,000 Somalis. Norway has 43,000. Finland—a country of only 5.5 million people total—has about 24,000, making Somalis the largest non-European ethnic minority in the country.

Why Scandinavia?

The answer lies in how different European countries handled asylum seekers in the 1990s. The Nordic welfare states had generous refugee policies. They offered resettlement programs, language training, housing assistance, and a path to permanent residency. For people fleeing a catastrophic civil war with nothing but the clothes on their backs, these countries represented safety and opportunity.

The Dutch Exodus

One of the strangest chapters in the Somali diaspora's European history involves the Netherlands.

From 1989 to 1998, the Netherlands was the second-most popular European destination for Somali immigrants, just behind the United Kingdom. Tens of thousands of Somalis built lives there—learned Dutch, found jobs, started businesses, raised children.

Then, between 2000 and 2005, something remarkable happened. An estimated 20,000 Somalis left the Netherlands and moved to Britain.

Twenty thousand people is a lot. That's not individuals making isolated decisions; that's a mass migration within Europe, from one wealthy Western country to another.

What drove it? Several factors combined. The assassination of the right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 (and later the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004) triggered a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in Dutch society. But according to Somali community organizations, the exodus had actually begun earlier, driven by frustration with Dutch integration policies.

The Dutch government's approach to immigrant integration was heavily assimilationist. Officials expected newcomers to adopt Dutch cultural norms, pass language and culture tests, and essentially become Dutch. Many Somalis experienced this as an attack on their identity—an attempt to erase their culture rather than simply help them participate in Dutch society.

Britain offered something different. A more multicultural approach. A larger existing Somali community. The English language, which many Somalis already spoke due to British colonial history. And crucially, an easier path to both employment and community.

The Integration Question

The experience of Somali communities in Europe raises difficult questions about immigration, integration, and belonging.

Consider the Danish statistics. Between 2008 and 2013, employment among Somalis in Denmark fell from 38 percent to 26 percent. By 2018, nearly half of working-age Somalis in Denmark had been unemployed for four years or more. A government analysis that year found that 44 percent of Somalis in Denmark lived in what officials termed "parallel societies"—communities with limited connection to mainstream Danish life.

These numbers are stark. But what do they actually tell us?

One interpretation is that Somali immigrants have failed to integrate. Another interpretation is that Danish society has failed to integrate them. A third interpretation—probably closer to the truth—is that the situation is enormously complicated.

Many of the Somalis who arrived in Europe in the 1990s came with severe trauma. They'd survived famine, witnessed violence, lost family members, spent years in refugee camps. Many had little formal education because the schools in their homeland had collapsed along with everything else. They arrived in countries whose languages they didn't speak, whose climates were brutally unfamiliar, whose social norms were utterly foreign to their experience.

Their children—the second generation—often face a different set of challenges. They grow up between cultures, fluent in the local language but marked as different by their names, their appearance, their religion. Studies consistently show that second-generation immigrants have higher unemployment rates than both their parents' generation and their native-born peers—a phenomenon sociologists call the "second-generation paradox."

America's Somali Heartland

The largest Somali community in the United States is in Minnesota. Specifically, in Minneapolis and its twin city St. Paul.

This seems geographically absurd. Minnesota has some of the coldest winters in the continental United States. The average January temperature in Minneapolis is fourteen degrees Fahrenheit—about minus ten Celsius. For people from one of the hottest countries on Earth, it's almost comically unsuitable.

Yet the community thrived. Today, estimates suggest between 40,000 and 100,000 Somalis live in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis—nicknamed "Little Mogadishu"—has become the center of Somali-American life. Somali-owned businesses line the streets. Somali restaurants serve traditional dishes. Somali-language radio stations broadcast news from home.

Why Minnesota? Partly because Lutheran church groups and Catholic charities, which had long histories of refugee resettlement, were particularly active there. Partly because early arrivals reported good experiences, which attracted family members and friends. Partly because the state's job market, particularly in meatpacking plants and manufacturing, offered entry-level employment for people without American credentials or English fluency.

Once a critical mass of Somalis had established themselves, the community became self-reinforcing. New arrivals could find people who spoke their language, ate their food, understood their culture, and could help them navigate American bureaucracy. This is how immigrant communities have always formed—it's why nineteenth-century New York had Little Italy and Chinatown and the Lower East Side's Jewish neighborhoods.

The Yemen Connection

The relationship between Somalia and Yemen is ancient. It predates both modern countries by millennia.

Look at a map and you'll see why. The two regions face each other across the Gulf of Aden and the Bab-el-Mandeb strait—at the narrowest point, only about twenty miles of water separate them. For as long as humans have built boats, they've crossed this strait to trade, to migrate, to raid, to intermarry.

Several Somali clans trace their ancestry to Yemen. During the colonial period, Yemenis fleeing internal conflicts sought refuge in Somali towns. The connections run deep in both directions.

When the Somali civil war erupted in 1991, Yemen returned the favor. The Yemeni government unconditionally opened its borders to Somali refugees. Unlike most countries, which subjected asylum seekers to lengthy screening processes and kept them in camps, Yemen simply let Somalis in and let them settle where they chose.

By the start of Yemen's own civil war in 2015, an estimated 500,000 Somalis lived there.

Then history repeated itself in reverse. As Yemen descended into what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis, Somalis began leaving. Many returned to their homeland—specifically to Somaliland, the self-declared independent state in northern Somalia that has remained relatively stable and peaceful while the south continued to struggle with conflict.

The irony is painful. Refugees from one devastated country finding safety in another, only to become refugees again when that country too collapses into war.

South Africa's Somali Shopkeepers

In the informal settlements around Cape Town, South Africa, a remarkable economic pattern has emerged. Somali entrepreneurs have come to dominate small-scale retail trade.

These aren't wealthy businesspeople. They're running small shops—called "spazas" in South African slang—in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. They sell basic goods: bread, milk, airtime vouchers, cigarettes, canned food. The margins are tiny. The work is exhausting.

But Somali traders have proved exceptionally good at it. They work long hours. They keep costs low. They pool resources within family and clan networks to capitalize new shops. They use their diaspora connections to source goods cheaply from international suppliers.

The success has not come without conflict. Somali shopkeepers have faced violent xenophobic attacks in South Africa, with local competitors sometimes accusing them of unfair business practices or taking jobs from South Africans. Dozens of Somalis have been killed in xenophobic violence over the past two decades.

Yet the community persists. The skills that helped Somalis survive civil war and displacement—resilience, family solidarity, entrepreneurial adaptability—turn out to be exactly the skills that help people succeed in the brutal economics of informal retail.

What the Diaspora Sends Home

Here's a number that doesn't get enough attention: Somalis living abroad send more money home to their relatives than Somalia receives in international aid.

These remittances—money transfers from diaspora members to family in Somalia—total somewhere between one and two billion dollars annually. For a country with a formal economy smaller than that of many individual American cities, this represents an enormous financial lifeline.

The remittance system works through a network of money transfer businesses called hawalas. The hawala system is ancient—it predates modern banking by centuries—and it operates largely on trust. You give money to a hawala operator in Minneapolis. Your relative picks up the equivalent amount from a hawala operator in Mogadishu. The two operators settle their accounts later.

This system has survived wars, government collapses, and repeated attempts by Western regulators to shut it down over money-laundering concerns. It survived because nothing else works. Somalia has barely any functioning banks. International wire transfers to the country are almost impossible. The hawala network fills a void that nothing else can fill.

The Question of Return

Every diaspora faces the question of return. Do we go back? Can we go back? Should we go back?

For the Somali diaspora, these questions are particularly fraught. Some parts of Somalia remain desperately dangerous. The terrorist group al-Shabaab controls significant territory and regularly carries out attacks even in areas nominally controlled by the government. Other regions—particularly Somaliland in the north—have achieved relative peace and stability but face their own challenges.

Some diaspora members have returned. They've brought skills, education, capital, and international connections that Somalia desperately needs. Doctors trained in American hospitals now run clinics in Mogadishu. Businesspeople who built fortunes abroad now invest in Somali real estate and telecommunications.

Others have tried and left again. The infrastructure barely functions. Corruption is endemic. The security situation remains precarious. For someone who spent twenty years building a life in London or Toronto, the adjustment is wrenching.

And for the second generation—young people who were born in Minneapolis or Manchester, who speak English or Swedish better than Somali, who have never seen their parents' homeland except in photographs—"return" means something entirely different. You can't return to a place you've never been.

A People in Motion

The Somali diaspora is not a static thing. It continues to shift and change.

In Denmark, nearly a thousand Somalis lost their residence permits between 2017 and 2018 after the government determined that parts of Somalia were safe enough for refugees to return. Whether those people actually returned to Somalia, moved to other European countries, or found ways to stay in Denmark is unclear.

In the United States, Somali-Americans have begun entering politics. Ilhan Omar, who came to America as a child refugee, was elected to Congress in 2018—the first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim women to serve in that body.

In Somalia itself, the diaspora's influence grows. Returned emigrants hold government positions, run businesses, teach in universities. They bring ideas and expertise shaped by their time abroad.

Two million people, scattered across the world, connected by language and culture and family and memory. They are building new lives in new countries while maintaining ties to a homeland many of them have never seen—or haven't seen in decades.

The story of the Somali diaspora is, in many ways, the story of the modern world: of borders that divide and connections that persist despite them, of violence that drives people from their homes and resilience that helps them build new ones, of integration and separation and the endless, complicated negotiation between belonging and being foreign.

It is not finished. It may never be finished. The Qurbajoogta continue to move, to adapt, to survive—just as they have for the past thirty years, just as diaspora communities have done throughout human history.