page_title: Armenian Americans
section_title: Geographic distribution
hierarchical_section_title: Armenian Americans / Geographic distribution
caption_attribution_description: English: Percentage of people self-identified as Armenian by ZIP code in the Los Angeles County, California, based on 2000 Census data
context_page_description: Armenian Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community of the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the United States took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the United States following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s, the Adana Massacre of 1909, and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. Since the 1950s many Armenians from the Middle East migrated to America as a result of political instability in the region. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons.
  The 2017 American Community Survey estimated that 485,970 Americans held full or partial Armenian ancestry. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead.
context_section_description: Most Armenian Americans are concentrated in major urban areas, especially in California and the Northeast, and to a lesser extent in the Midwest. The highest concentrations of Americans of Armenian ancestry are in Los Angeles, New York and Boston. According to the 2000 Census, the states with largest Armenian populations were California (204,631), Massachusetts (28,595), New York (24,460), New Jersey (17,094), Michigan (15,746), Florida (9,226), Pennsylvania (8,220), Illinois (7,958), Rhode Island (6,677) and Texas (4,941).
caption: Distribution of Armenians in Los Angeles County, 2000.
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