On a Friday afternoon in East Plano, the car park behind a 33,000 square foot mosque on 14th Street fills with sedans bearing Plano ISD honour-roll decals and the badges of Texas Instruments, Capital One and Toyota. The men stepping out wear lanyards from corporate campuses a few exits up the Dallas North Tollway. This is the everyday face of the Pakistanis in Plano, Texas: a community of engineers, physicians and accountants who came for the jobs and stayed for the schools, and who built, prayer hall by prayer hall and grocery aisle by grocery aisle, one of the most prosperous Pakistani enclaves in the American South.
The Place
Plano sits about twenty miles north of downtown Dallas, a city of roughly 295,000 that was farmland within living memory. Its fortunes turned in 1985, when Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems planted itself in the master-planned Legacy development off the tollway.
Frito-Lay and JCPenney followed, and later Toyota North America and FedEx Office, turning the corn fields of the old Telecom Corridor into one of the densest corporate clusters in Texas. The median household income now sits above $110,000, and Plano’s schools are routinely ranked among the best in the state.
That combination, white-collar jobs and elite public education, is exactly what drew skilled immigrants. Among them, in steadily growing numbers from the 1980s onward, were Pakistanis.
How It Became Pakistani
The Pakistani presence in Plano is not the story of a single neighbourhood block. It is the story of a professional class spreading across the northern suburbs of Dallas, with Plano near its centre. To understand it you have to start with the metroplex, and with a federal law passed long before Legacy West existed.
The 1965 door, the 1980s arrival
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas and prioritised skilled workers and family reunification. For Pakistan, a young country with English-medium universities and an oversupply of doctors and engineers, that opened a door.
The first wave landed in American teaching hospitals and graduate engineering programmes through the late 1960s and 1970s. By 1984, North Texas had enough Pakistani families to support its first community organisation. The Dallas-Fort Worth area today is home to an estimated 19,000 Pakistanis, and the first arrivals were overwhelmingly professionals: physicians, accountants, computer scientists.
The corporate magnet
What turned a scattering of families into a concentration was work. When EDS opened its Information Management Center in Plano in 1989, it was the heart of a worldwide communications network that needed exactly the skills South Asian immigrants had trained for.
The tech boom of the 1990s amplified everything. Pakistani engineers who had arrived for graduate school found that the Telecom Corridor, running through Richardson and Plano, was hiring. Where the parents of the first generation had often settled near the older mosques of Richardson, the next generation moved north into Plano and its newer subdivisions, closer to the jobs and the best schools. The same dynamic remade the suburb for other immigrant professionals, from the Indian families of Plano to the Chinese community drawn to the same campuses and schools.
Garages, trailers and a permanent home
The clearest measure of the community’s growth is the institutions it built. The Islamic Association of North Texas, founded by six Muslim families in the late 1960s and incorporated in 1971, anchored the older South Asian Muslim community in Richardson at 840 Abrams Road. Its central mosque, with its domes and minaret, became the metroplex’s mother congregation.
Plano’s own mosque tells a more recent story. The East Plano Islamic Center, known to everyone as EPIC, began as small gatherings in garages in 2003. It moved through a trailer, then a strip mall, then a 10,000 square foot building in 2008, before opening its permanent home at 4700 14th Street in July 2015. With room for 3,200 worshippers and resident scholar Yasir Qadhi, a nationally known Islamic theologian, EPIC turned East Plano into a centre of Muslim life rather than an outpost of it.
A community in the headlines
That visibility came with friction. In late 2024, EPIC and its development partners proposed EPIC City, a 402-acre community near the small town of Josephine that would include homes, a school, senior housing and a new mosque.
The plan drew a wave of state scrutiny. Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton raised concerns, multiple state agencies opened investigations, and the U.S. Department of Justice briefly probed allegations of religious discrimination before closing its inquiry in June 2025. For many Pakistani families in Plano, the episode was a reminder that a community can be both deeply rooted and freshly contested, even after forty years.
The Landmarks
East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC Masjid), 4700 14th Street. The community’s defining building, opened in July 2015 with capacity for 3,200. What began in 2003 as gatherings in a handful of garages is now the spiritual centre of Muslim Plano, drawing Pakistani, Arab and South Asian families to Friday prayers and youth programmes alike.
Islamic Association of North Texas (IANT), 840 Abrams Road, Richardson. The metroplex’s founding mosque, incorporated in 1971 by six families. Its elementary school, opened in 2002, its summer Qur’an programme and its free medical clinic made it the institution where an earlier generation of Pakistani families in the area put down roots.
Plano Texas King, 3825 W Spring Creek Pkwy. A combined zabihah halal meat market and Pakistani restaurant, the kind of one-stop shop that makes a suburb liveable for a Muslim family. The butcher counter and grocery aisles supply the kitchen; the restaurant serves the biryani, seekh kababs and karahi when no one wants to cook.
Signature Kabab & Grill, Plano. A neighbourhood standby blending Pakistani and Indian flavours, from fish pakoras to chicken boti and beef seekh kababs. It is the sort of place that anchors a weekday community, busy with families breaking the routine of corporate cafeterias.
Sara’s, 750 S. Sherman Street, Richardson. A South Asian grocery widely regarded as one of the best in the Dallas area, with a whole aisle of tea, an excellent butcher counter and bulk grains by the sack. For Pakistani households across Plano and Richardson, it is a weekend ritual.
Plano East Senior High School. One of the flagship campuses of a district that ranks among Texas’s strongest, with average school ratings of nine out of ten. For Pakistani parents weighing where to settle, the reputation of Plano ISD has been a deciding factor for a generation.
Pakistan Cultural Association of North Texas (PCANT). A community organisation that draws Pakistani families from Plano, Frisco, Allen, McKinney and beyond, hosting the cultural and social gatherings that keep an immigrant identity alive in the suburbs. Alongside the Pakistan Society of North Texas, it organises the Independence Day and Pakistan Day celebrations that mark the community’s calendar.
Where They Came From
The Pakistanis who settled in Plano did not arrive from one village or province. They came through the filter of the professions, which meant they came from Pakistan’s cities: Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad.
Many were Muhajir or Punjabi families whose own parents had moved to those cities a generation earlier. They were the products of Pakistan’s English-medium schools and its medical and engineering colleges, and they migrated along the channels those credentials opened: graduate programmes, hospital residencies, H-1B visas in the tech years.
The result is a community defined less by region of origin than by class and education. Over 60 percent of Pakistani Americans hold college degrees, and in Plano that figure feels conservative. The chain that brought them was not a kinship network from a single district but a professional pipeline that ran from Pakistan’s universities to America’s hospitals and corporate campuses, and finally to the tollway suburbs north of Dallas. It is a markedly different path from the older working-class Pakistani enclaves built around small business, such as Little Pakistan in Brooklyn or the shops and restaurants of Devon Avenue in Chicago, and closer in spirit to the suburban professional class of Pakistani Sugar Land outside Houston.
Plano Today
Today Plano is home to roughly 3,521 Pakistani residents, the fifth-largest Pakistani population of any city in Texas and a little over one percent of Plano’s people. Add neighbouring Frisco and Irving, and the northern arc of the metroplex holds one of the densest Pakistani concentrations in the state, second only to the Houston area.
The life of that community runs along a corridor more than a single street. Friday prayers at EPIC in East Plano, groceries at Texas King or a weekend run to Sara’s in Richardson, dinner at Signature Kabab, Eid gatherings organised through PCANT, and on Monday morning, back to the campuses of Legacy West and the Telecom Corridor. The children move through some of the best public schools in Texas, and many of them stay in the metroplex as adults, the second generation now raising a third.
It is a community that is comfortable and, lately, visible in ways it was not before. The EPIC City controversy thrust East Plano’s Muslims into statewide and national news, a sign of how large the community has grown and how closely it is now watched. Whatever becomes of that project, the everyday Plano remains: prosperous, professional, and unmistakably part of the suburb it helped build.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Pakistanis live in Plano, Texas?
Plano is home to roughly 3,521 Pakistani residents, about 1.23 percent of the city’s population. That makes it the fifth-largest Pakistani population of any city in Texas, behind Houston, Sugar Land, Irving and Dallas.
Why did so many Pakistanis in Plano, Texas settle in the area?
They came chiefly for work and education. The corporate boom along the Telecom Corridor and at Plano’s Legacy development drew skilled engineers and professionals, while Plano ISD’s top-ranked schools made the suburb attractive for families. Most arrived as physicians, engineers, accountants and computer scientists.
What is the main mosque for Pakistanis in Plano?
The East Plano Islamic Center, known as EPIC Masjid, at 4700 14th Street, is the community’s principal mosque, with capacity for 3,200 worshippers. The older Islamic Association of North Texas in nearby Richardson, incorporated in 1971, anchored an earlier generation of South Asian Muslim families.
Where can you find Pakistani food and halal groceries in Plano?
Plano Texas King on W Spring Creek Parkway combines a zabihah halal meat market with a Pakistani restaurant, and Signature Kabab & Grill serves Pakistani and Indian dishes. For groceries, many families also drive to Sara’s on S. Sherman Street in Richardson, one of the best South Asian markets in the Dallas area.
What was the EPIC City controversy?
EPIC City was a proposed 402-acre Muslim-led development near Josephine, north-east of Plano, announced in late 2024. It drew investigations from Texas officials and a brief federal probe over alleged religious discrimination, which the U.S. Department of Justice closed in June 2025. The community’s legal team denied the allegations.
Are Plano’s Pakistani families connected to the wider Dallas community?
Yes. Plano’s Pakistanis are part of an estimated 19,000-strong Pakistani population across Dallas-Fort Worth, linked through mosques in Plano and Richardson and through organisations like the Pakistan Cultural Association of North Texas, which serves families from Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney.
If your family’s story passed through Plano, or any of the places Pakistanis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a residency in Karachi or an engineering degree in Lahore, to a Friday prayer on 14th Street and a house in a top-ranked school district, to wherever you are now.