Tunisian Internal and External Migrations – Zoom Seminar

Both internal and external migrations are in Tunisia the result of decades of accumulated gaps of development and planning between, on the one hand, the coast and its large cities, which are well polarised and linked to globalisation and high value-added activities, and, on the other hand, the inland regions (the West and the South), which have low development indicators and suffer from investment deficits and high unemployment and poverty rates. The working-class neighbourhoods of the large coastal cities are at the centre of a “chassez-croisee” of internal migrants coming from inland regions who settle there, or extend their routes and cross the Mediterranean irregularly in order to reach Europe. Usually, Tunisian, North African and Sub-Saharan irregular migrants embark on the same boats. Hassen Boubakri will present, from a southern Mediterranean perspective, the different dimensions of migration (internal and international) in Tunisia, a small country (12 million inhabitants) in North Africa, located in the heart of the central Mediterranean, with strong links to Europe, but also open to sub-Saharan Africa and to other countries in the region, Libya in particular. This geographical situation, combined with the migratory traditions with its southern and northern neighbours, makes Tunisia an educational case of the complexity of migration dynamics (departure/transit and destination). This complexity is further accentuated by the role that Tunisia plays in the management, the control and even the repression of regular and irregular migration flows of its own citizens, or of migrants and refugees coming from other countries in the region, especially from sub-Saharan Africa. Tunisia, like other third countries of North Africa, is between two fires: cooperating with the EU and its Member States to contain and stop the irregular departures crossing the Mediterranean in order to reach Europe, or taking into consideration its own interests in the governance of migration, interests that do not always correspond to those of Europe, its Northern neighbourhood.