On a Friday afternoon in downtown Cary, the lunchtime queue at Kababish Cafe runs out the door of a converted bungalow on West Chatham Street, software engineers in lanyards waiting beside families for chicken karahi and freshly griddled naan. A few miles west, the call to prayer rises from a mosque founded by a handful of immigrants in 2004. This is the everyday texture of the Pakistanis in Cary, a community that arrived for the laboratories and server rooms of the Research Triangle and stayed to build a home.
The Place
Cary sits in Wake County, wedged between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill at the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. It began in 1871 as a rural railroad stop of fewer than 150 people, spread across a single square mile.
For a century, little changed. Then the Research Triangle Park took root nearby, and Cary’s population, which stood at around 8,000 in 1971, exploded: 21,000 by 1980, 44,000 by 1990, and more than 170,000 today across some 60 square miles.
It is now one of the most affluent and consistently highly ranked suburbs in the country, with a median household income of roughly 135,000 dollars. Cary is home to SAS Institute, long the world’s largest privately held software company, and its prosperity is built on technology, research, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
How It Became Pakistani
The Pakistani presence in Cary is, in the long arc of American immigration, a recent story. It is also a deliberate one. Pakistanis did not drift to this corner of North Carolina by chance. They followed work, and the work was extraordinary.
The Triangle as a magnet
When the Research Triangle Park opened its doors to IBM and federal research laboratories in the 1960s, it set in motion a demand for highly educated technical labour that the region has never stopped feeding. The Triangle grew into one of America’s premier hubs for software, biotechnology and pharmaceutical research.
That demand reached deep into Pakistan’s professional classes. The engineers and physicians who emigrated under the skilled-worker provisions of post-1965 American immigration law were precisely the people the Triangle wanted. They came with degrees from Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, and they found employers who valued them.
Why Cary in particular
Within the Triangle, Cary became the residential choice for a specific reason: its schools. Wake County’s public schools, and Cary’s in particular, rank among the strongest in the state, and for immigrant families investing everything in their children’s futures, that mattered more than almost anything else.
Cary offered safe streets, large new houses, short commutes to the Park and to Raleigh’s hospitals, and neighbours who were themselves overwhelmingly newcomers. A family relocating from Pakistan was not moving into an established town with fixed social hierarchies. It was moving into a place still being assembled, where almost everyone had arrived from somewhere else.
The chain takes hold
Immigration of this kind tends to compound. One physician recruited to a Raleigh hospital tells a cousin still in Lahore. One software architect at a Triangle firm sponsors a colleague. A sister joins a brother. The community thickens, household by household.
By the time the wider South Asian population in Cary had become impossible to overlook, the infrastructure of a settled community was already forming. Halal butchers opened. A mosque was founded. Desi grocers stocked the spices that home cooking required. The Pakistani families who had arrived as isolated professionals found themselves, within a generation, part of a recognisable neighbourhood.
An affluent, professional migration
It is worth being precise about who these immigrants were. The Pakistani community in Cary is, for the most part, a professional one: doctors, software developers, researchers, engineers, pharmacists and the small business owners who serve them.
This is a pattern Pakistanis have repeated across America’s wealthiest, most education-driven suburbs, from the technology corridors of Plano, Texas to the engineering enclaves of Sugar Land and the data-centre belt around Ashburn, Virginia. Cary belongs firmly to that family of places: affluent, suburban, and shaped by the skilled-worker visa.
It stands in contrast to the older, denser, more working-class Pakistani settlements of the Northeast, the kind found along Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey. Cary’s Pakistani story was written in cul-de-sacs and office parks rather than crowded high streets.
The Landmarks
Islamic Center of Cary, 1155 West Chatham Street. Established in 2004 by a small group seeking a place of worship close to home, the Islamic Association of Cary bought land that same year to build a permanent masjid. It has grown into one of the larger Islamic centres in North Carolina, running the Iqra Academy day and Sunday schools, youth programmes, an interfaith committee and burial services for the wider Muslim community of Wake County.
Islamic Association of Raleigh, 808 Atwater Street, Raleigh. Founded in 1981 and built in 1985, the IAR is the Triangle’s senior mosque, a 40,000 square foot centre with two prayer halls and an educational wing. For many Pakistani families who arrived before the Cary masjid existed, this was the first communal anchor, and it remains a regional gathering point.
Kababish Cafe, 201 West Chatham Street. Opened in August 2015 in the heart of downtown Cary, Kababish serves desi cooking from scratch, all halal, with the spices of Pakistan and India. Its lunchtime queues of Triangle office workers have made it a small landmark, a place where colleagues discover karahi and biryani together.
Casablanca Market and Fresh Halal Meats, 1365 Southeast Maynard Road. A halal butcher and international grocer carrying Pakistani, Indian and Turkish goods, it is the kind of shop that makes a neighbourhood liveable for an immigrant family: fresh zabiha meat cut to order, the right lentils, the right tea.
The East Chatham Street grocers. A short run of South Asian shops, including Patel Brothers at 802 East Chatham Street, has turned a stretch of downtown into a desi provisioning district, where Pakistani and Indian families shop side by side for the staples of home kitchens.
North Carolina Pakistani-American Anjuman. A non-political, non-sectarian cultural and social organisation, the Anjuman exists to bring together Pakistani families across the Triangle for social and cultural life. It is the secular counterpart to the mosque, organising the gatherings, programmes and volunteer committees that keep a dispersed suburban community in touch with itself.
Downtown Cary Park. The town’s reimagined central park, opened in the 2020s, has become a shared civic stage where Cary’s many communities, Pakistani families among them, gather for movie nights, festivals and ordinary weekend afternoons. It is a reminder that this community’s life is not separate from Cary’s, but woven into it.
Where They Came From
The Pakistanis who settled in Cary came overwhelmingly from the country’s great urban centres, the cities that produce its educated professional class. Karachi, the sprawling commercial capital on the Arabian Sea, sent engineers and doctors. Lahore, the cultural heart of Punjab, sent academics and physicians. Islamabad and Rawalpindi sent administrators and technologists.
This urban origin matters. The migration to Cary was not, in the main, a movement of villagers or labourers. It was a movement of graduates, people who had already left their own home towns for Pakistan’s metropolises before leaving Pakistan altogether.
They were drawn by the same forces that drew skilled migrants to the rest of the Triangle: an immigration system that favoured the highly educated, and a regional economy that could not get enough of them. Once a few families had established themselves, the ordinary mechanics of kinship and friendship did the rest, knitting Lahore and Karachi to a North Carolina suburb one sponsorship at a time.
Cary Today
Cary today is one of the most diverse suburbs in the American South, and its Asian population, at roughly a fifth of all residents, is among the highest of any town its size in North Carolina. Indians form the largest single Asian group here by a wide margin, and the Pakistani community lives within that broader South Asian world, sharing its mosques, its grocers, its restaurants and much of its cultural life.
That shared world is visible everywhere. Pakistani and Indian families shop at the same East Chatham Street stores, queue at the same halal counters, and send their children to the same top-ranked schools. The community’s life overlaps closely with the wider South Asian presence documented in our profiles of the Indians in Cary and, more distantly, the Koreans in Cary, all of them drawn by the same combination of schools, jobs and quiet prosperity.
What it does not have is a single visible quarter, a street you could point to and call Pakistani. The community is dispersed through subdivisions and office parks, gathering at the mosque, at the Anjuman’s events and around the dinner tables of downtown’s restaurants rather than living shoulder to shoulder. That is the nature of an affluent, professional migration. It is no less real for being quiet, and for the families who built it, Cary has become unmistakably home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Pakistanis live in Cary, North Carolina?
Precise, separately reported figures for the Pakistani population of Cary are not published in standard census tables, so an exact count cannot be verified. What is documented is that Cary’s overall Asian population is roughly 20 percent of residents, within which Indians are by far the largest group, and the Pakistani community lives within this broader South Asian world.
Why did Pakistanis settle in Cary?
The Pakistanis in Cary came chiefly for work and schools. The nearby Research Triangle Park created enormous demand for engineers, doctors, researchers and software professionals, and Cary offered top-ranked public schools, safe neighbourhoods and short commutes. It became the residential choice for many skilled Pakistani immigrants and their families.
Is there a mosque in Cary for the Pakistani community?
Yes. The Islamic Association of Cary, also known as the Islamic Center of Cary, was founded in 2004 and sits at 1155 West Chatham Street. It is one of the larger Islamic centres in North Carolina and serves Muslims, including many Pakistani families, throughout Wake County. The older Islamic Association of Raleigh, founded in 1981, also draws Triangle worshippers.
Where can you find Pakistani food in Cary?
Downtown Cary is the centre of desi dining. Kababish Cafe at 201 West Chatham Street serves halal Pakistani and Indian cooking made from scratch, and nearby East Chatham Street grocers and halal butchers such as Casablanca Market on Maynard Road supply the ingredients for home kitchens.
What part of Pakistan are Cary’s Pakistanis from?
Most came from Pakistan’s major urban centres, particularly Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the cities that produce the country’s educated professional class. This was largely a migration of graduates: doctors, engineers, researchers and software developers rather than rural labourers.
Is there a Pakistani community organisation in Cary?
Yes. The North Carolina Pakistani-American Anjuman is a non-political, non-sectarian cultural and social organisation serving Pakistani families across the Triangle, including Cary. It organises social and cultural gatherings and provides a secular complement to the religious life centred on the area’s mosques.
If your family’s story passed through Cary, or any of the places Pakistanis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the streets of Karachi and Lahore to the laboratories of the Research Triangle, to wherever you are now.