It’s dangerous to be a migrant in Tunisia right now.
The country’s president, Kais Saied, recently claimed in a high-profile speech that “hordes” of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa were part of a “criminal enterprise … aimed at changing the demographic composition of Tunisia” and erasing its “Arab-Muslim” heritage. Just this month the police evicted dozens of migrants who had set up camp outside the UNHCR building to protest their treatment. And the possibility of illegal pushbacks and deadly shipwrecks lies in wait for anybody who, escaping violence and precarity, decides to try their luck on the Mediterranean.
Migrants in Tunisia aren’t the only ones caught up in the current global attack on the right to seek asylum. The UK government is pursing what is essentially “an asylum ban,” the US government is in the middle of a border crackdown, and EU leaders are doing all they can to reinforce “Fortress Europe.” But their predicament highlights how, for refugees, the situation is quickly becoming ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. They face inhumane and counterproductive policies both where they are and wherever they are trying to get to.
