One in five Tunisians wants to leave Tunisia: this edifying figure was unveiled on Wednesday, December 8 by a national survey on migration, carried out by the National Migration Observatory (ONM) and the National Institute of Statistics (INS). The proportion is even higher among young people aged 15 to 29: 40% of them want to go to Europe.
This study shows how young people face a wall in Tunisia. Unemployment hits 40% of them. This is the case of Bilal, 24 years old. “All the young people like me, at the café, they don’t even have a dinar in their pocket “, tells this young man who ceased his studies before the baccalaureate. Very quickly, like so many others, he found himself in an impasse. He knows it would take a miracle to get a stable job. “Here, if you are lucky enough to find a job, you have to accept a minimal salary and you barely have enough to survive.”
He knows it would take an even greater miracle to get a visa to Europe, but he’s determined to make it to the continent anyway. “We young people only dream of leaving this country. It doesn’t matter if we die at sea.” Tunisians are the first nationality to reach Italy illegally, with more than a quarter of arrivals this year, according to figures from the High Commission for Refugees. Dozens of Tunisians do not reach Europe and die at sea.
How to explain that so many Tunisians consider that they have no future in their country? First of all, there is an economy practically at a standstill, as Bilal said. Then there is a distrust of the political class and therefore of democracy. According to polls, the president – who has monopolized all power since July 25 – remains extremely popular. However, on the ground, one realizes very quickly how much the Tunisians do not expect much from him.
Young people are not the only ones who want to leave. Indeed, graduates also very often want to leave the country. The study thus sheds light on this country which is draining its brains. According to a young doctor, “you have to be crazy to stay in Tunisia”. He would like stay in his country but cannot because of the mlack of means and wages at their lowest. “Europe wants to take the cream, the graduates!”, rebels Ramy Salhy, director of the Maghreb office of Euromed rights, an NGO that brings together human rights defenders from both shores of the Mediterranean.
He is very angry with the European Union: “It’s amazing to see the number of doctors, engineers, computer scientists, who work in Europe! Tunisia, it invests with very few means and then they are recovered by Europe. It’s a shame!” He believes that the European Union is adopting a “selective position”, thus leaving other candidates for migration by the wayside: “We have to block them. They’re not coming.” More than ten years after the Tunisian revolution, no one sees how the economic situation in Tunisia could improve rapidly. However, young people in particular – graduates or not – can no longer wait.