On a Friday afternoon in Schaumburg, the call to prayer drifts out from a low brick building on Irving Park Road, and the cars filling the lot carry license-plate frames from medical practices, software firms and the long commute back from the Loop. The Pakistanis in Schaumburg did not arrive looking for a Little Pakistan. They arrived looking for good schools, a short drive to O’Hare and a quiet street, and they built a community in the spaces between, in a mosque, a grocery aisle and a Sunday buffet.
The Place
Schaumburg sits roughly 30 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, a village of about 78,700 people spread across some 19 square miles of what was once Cook County farmland. It was incorporated on 7 March 1956, when residents acted to keep neighbouring towns from annexing their land.
What turned the cornfields into a regional capital of commerce was Woodfield Mall, which opened in 1971 and grew into roughly 2.2 million square feet of retail, long ranked among the largest shopping centres in the country. Around it gathered office parks, hotels and corporate headquarters.
The result is an affluent, white-collar suburb with a median household income above 82,000 dollars and major employers such as Zurich North America and Motorola Solutions. It is the kind of place that draws people who measure a town by its schools and its commute, which is precisely why so many Pakistani families chose it.
How It Became Pakistani
The Pakistani presence in Schaumburg is a story of professionals, not of a single founding wave. It begins not in the suburb at all but in Chicago, on a six-block stretch of Devon Avenue that became the Midwest’s South Asian high street.
From Devon Avenue outward
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reopened American doors to skilled migrants, and among the first Pakistanis to come were doctors, engineers and academics. Many settled first in the Uptown and West Ridge neighbourhoods of Chicago, where Devon Avenue grew into a corridor of South Asian shops, restaurants and grocers.
Devon was the landing strip. It was where a newly arrived family could find halal meat, a familiar spice and a relative who had come before. But it was rarely the destination. As careers steadied and children arrived, families looked outward, toward the suburbs and their schools.
The professional suburb
The decades that followed brought a second and third movement. Family-reunification provisions through the 1980s and 1990s, and the H-1B visa route for engineers and IT workers from the 1990s onward, expanded the Pakistani population far beyond the city. Metropolitan Chicago today holds one of the largest Pakistani American communities in the United States, by most counts the fourth largest of any metro area. It is part of a national map of professional Pakistani settlement that runs from the new suburbs of Frisco, Texas to the older enclaves of Edison, New Jersey.
Those families did not concentrate in one suburb the way earlier immigrants had concentrated on one avenue. They spread across Cook and DuPage counties, into Des Plaines, Glendale Heights, Hanover Park, Hoffman Estates, Mount Prospect, Palatine and Skokie, and west toward the Pakistani families of Naperville. Schaumburg, with its strong public schools, its airport access and its dense job market, became one of the natural anchors of that northwest-suburban arc.
The pull was the same set of things every striving family wants. A good district. A safe street. A house with a yard. A short enough drive to work and to the airport that a parent could fly to Karachi or Lahore for a wedding and be back at a desk on Monday.
Building the institutions
A community of professionals scattered across subdivisions needs somewhere to gather, and the gathering places came. In 1992, the Islamic Center of Schaumburg, known as Masjid Al-Huda, was established to serve the growing Muslim population of the northwest suburbs, a congregation drawn heavily from the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi subcontinent. The same northwest-suburban arc is home to a large Indian community in Schaumburg and a Chinese community alongside it.
The mosque ran weekend Islamic school for children and classes for women, taught in English and in Urdu, the language so many Pakistani families spoke at home. For parents raising children far from grandparents in Punjab or Sindh, the masjid did the work that an extended family once did, teaching the prayers, the script and the festivals.
Larger institutions rose nearby. Just to the south, in Lombard, the DarusSalam Foundation completed an 87,000-square-foot mosque and Islamic centre in 2013, with a full-time K-12 academy attached. It drew worshippers from across the western and northwestern suburbs, Schaumburg’s Pakistani families among them.
The pattern across the northwest suburbs is a familiar one for immigrant America. First the people arrive, quietly, one job offer at a time. Then the grocery stores follow the people. Then the restaurants follow the grocers. And finally the mosque rises to hold them all together.
The Landmarks
Islamic Center of Schaumburg (Masjid Al-Huda), 1081 Irving Park Road, Schaumburg. Established in 1992, the masjid is the spiritual centre of gravity for the area’s South Asian Muslims. Its weekly classes run in both English and Urdu, and on Fridays the lot fills with the cars of doctors, engineers and shop owners who slip out of the workday for jumu’ah prayer.
Patel Brothers, 830 W Golf Road, Schaumburg. The Schaumburg branch of the chain that began on Devon Avenue in 1974 is the pantry of suburban South Asian life. Aisles of atta flour, lentils, frozen parathas and masalas mean a Pakistani family no longer has to drive into the city for a proper Sunday cook-up. The chain grew into the largest South Asian grocer in the country.
Tasty Nihari, 2255 W Schaumburg Road, Schaumburg. A halal Pakistani and Indian kitchen named for the slow-cooked beef stew that anchors a Lahori breakfast. Its weekend buffets pull in families after prayers, the long tables of biryani and karahi doing the social work that a village square once did.
Desi Tadka, 927 W Golf Road, Schaumburg. A newer halal restaurant in a strip mall off Golf Road, part of the steady turnover of desi kitchens that signals a community large enough to keep several of them in business at once. The name, roughly “the home-style tempering of spices,” is a promise of food cooked the way a mother would.
Woodfield Mall, 5 Woodfield Mall, Schaumburg. The engine that built the modern suburb, opened in 1971 and long one of America’s largest shopping centres. For immigrant families it has been more than retail. It is the neutral, climate-controlled common ground where teenagers meet, grandparents stroll and the whole sprawling region comes to be among other people.
DarusSalam Foundation, 21W525 North Avenue, Lombard. A short drive south, this 87,000-square-foot mosque and Islamic centre, completed in 2013, anchors Muslim life across the western suburbs and draws Schaumburg families to its larger Eid gatherings and its K-12 academy. It is the kind of campus a scattered professional community builds once it has truly put down roots.
Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel and Convention Center, 1551 N Thoreau Drive, Schaumburg. The glass-and-stone hotel that hosts the weddings, banquets and community fundraisers a prosperous diaspora throws as it comes of age. A South Asian wedding here, with its mehndi and its hundreds of guests, is a marker that a family has arrived in every sense.
Where They Came From
The Pakistanis of Schaumburg trace their origins to the heartland of the country, above all to the Punjab and to the great cities of Karachi and Lahore, with families from Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Urdu-speaking Muhajir communities woven in.
The selection that brought them was occupational. American immigration law from 1965 onward favoured the highly educated, so the people who came were disproportionately physicians, engineers, accountants and, later, software professionals. They were the graduates of Pakistan’s best universities, the people whose skills travelled.
That professional skew shaped the settlement. A community of salaried doctors and engineers can afford a suburban mortgage and prizes a strong school district, which is why Schaumburg and its neighbours, rather than a single dense enclave, became home. The Devon Avenue corridor remained the cultural pantry, the place to shop and eat, but the houses were out here in the northwest.
Schaumburg Today
Today the Pakistani community of Schaumburg is woven into an affluent, internationally minded suburb rather than set apart from it. The 2020 census counted Asian residents at more than a quarter of the village, around 20,800 people, the South Asian share of that figure being a significant part of the town’s quiet transformation.
It is a community that mostly does not announce itself. There is no single Pakistani main street here, no banner-strung enclave. There is instead a mosque on Irving Park Road, a Patel Brothers off Golf Road, a handful of biryani houses, and thousands of families threaded invisibly through the cul-de-sacs.
The larger celebrations spill just beyond the village line. Pakistan Independence Day each August draws Chicago-area families to flag-hoistings and parades at venues such as Camera Park in Glendale Heights and the DuPage County Fairgrounds in Wheaton, where diplomats, community leaders and thousands of ordinary families gather under the green and white. Schaumburg’s contribution is the steady, undramatic kind: a second generation now in the schools and the workforce, raising a third, holding on to Urdu and the Friday prayer while becoming thoroughly, comfortably suburban American.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Pakistani community in Schaumburg, Illinois?
There is no precise count of Pakistanis in Schaumburg alone, but the village’s 2020 census recorded Asian residents at about 26 percent, roughly 20,800 people, with South Asians a substantial part of that. Schaumburg is one of the anchor suburbs of metropolitan Chicago’s Pakistani American population, which ranks among the largest of any US metro area.
Why did Pakistanis settle in Schaumburg rather than in Chicago?
Most Pakistani families first encountered Chicago through the South Asian corridor on Devon Avenue, but the Pakistanis in Schaumburg moved to the suburb for its strong public schools, its proximity to O’Hare and its dense job market. The community is largely professional, made up of doctors, engineers and IT workers who could afford suburban homes and prized good school districts.
Where do Pakistani families in Schaumburg worship?
The main local mosque is the Islamic Center of Schaumburg, known as Masjid Al-Huda, established in 1992 at 1081 Irving Park Road. It serves a congregation drawn heavily from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi families and teaches classes in English and Urdu. Many families also attend the larger DarusSalam Foundation mosque in nearby Lombard.
Where can you find Pakistani food and groceries in Schaumburg?
Patel Brothers at 830 W Golf Road is the major South Asian grocer, stocking the flours, lentils, spices and frozen breads of a Pakistani kitchen. For meals, Tasty Nihari at 2255 W Schaumburg Road and Desi Tadka at 927 W Golf Road serve halal Pakistani and Indian dishes, with weekend buffets popular after Friday prayers.
When did Pakistanis begin arriving in the Chicago suburbs?
The first significant wave followed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which favoured skilled professionals. Family-reunification arrivals through the 1980s and 1990s, and H-1B technology workers from the 1990s onward, expanded the community and pushed it outward from Devon Avenue into suburbs such as Schaumburg across Cook and DuPage counties.
Where in Pakistan do Schaumburg’s families mostly come from?
Most trace their roots to the Punjab and to the cities of Karachi and Lahore, with families from Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Urdu-speaking Muhajir community as well. Because US immigration favoured the highly educated, those who came were disproportionately graduates of Pakistan’s leading universities working in medicine, engineering and technology.
If your family’s story passed through Schaumburg, or any of the places Pakistanis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the streets of Lahore and Karachi to a Friday prayer on Irving Park Road, to wherever you are now.