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September 23, 2026
The Reston Multicultural Festival took place on Saturday, marking its 25th anniversary. I want to thank the Reston Community Center, Reston Town Center Association and BXP for hosting this annual event.
For those who’ve never attended, the festival honors Reston’s founding principles that embrace arts, culture and inclusivity as cornerstones for our community. It’s a celebration of our rich diversity, cultures and heritages, featuring music, dance, traditional crafts and cultural traditions from around the world.
As I said in my remarks at the festival’s opening, multiculturalism and diversity are our community’s strength — and it’s what attracts people to Reston.
Thanks to Bob Simon, Reston was founded in the early 1960s as an open community, welcoming people of all races. At the time, people thought he was crazy, and he was turned down by dozens of banks that refused to help finance Reston’s development.
Now today, we embrace his vision and foresight. In fact, Fairfax County as a whole is becoming ever more diverse, as revealed in the latest demographic report.
This report, which was released in June, reveals this shift. Less than half of the county’s residents are now white (49.5%), according to 2020 Census data cited in the report. Twenty years prior, however, white residents made up almost 70% of our population.
Today, Asians make up 20.5% of the county’s population while Hispanics account for 17.3%. African Americans total 9.6% of residents, up 1% from 20 years ago. (View demographic data in this interactive, online dashboard.)
Why is diversity and multiculturalism so important? For me personally it means a much less boring place. But it helps us to look at problems in new ways by broadening our perspectives, fuels innovation in the arts, food, culture and business and challenges us to work harder to understand each other.
It’s also vital to our economic success. Immigrants are 80% more likely to start a business than people born in the U.S., an MIT study found. And, immigrant entrepreneurs are responsible for founding or co-founding some of the most valuable publicly traded companies in the US, including Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Space X (regardless of what you may think about its founder) and Instacart. Some may say immigration is a zero sum game, but our economic history loudly says au contraire.
As a nation of immigrants, we’ve benefited from their contributions to this country from the very beginning (Alexander Hamilton, anyone…) until now. Just to mention a few other examples, there were the Chinese and Irish immigrants who the built the transcontinental railroad, Albert Einstein, Irving Berlin composer of “God Bless America” and Levi Strauss whose signature product we’ve all worn.
Diversity enriches us all, and I’m always amazed by the incredible diversity of Hunter Mill residents. At my booth this weekend, festivalgoers were invited to pin a world map, marking where they were born or where they’ve lived outside the U.S. As you can see from the photo above, pins dot every continent (except Antarctica, of course).
I’m so proud to be a Restonian where we’ve embraced multiculturalism and diversity from the beginning.
Regards,
Walter
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