In Tunisia, the condition of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa has drastically worsened since 2023, due to control and repression campaigns promoted by the authorities against unregulated work. The tightening of controls has led to the progressive exclusion of migrants from the formal labor market, forcing them to survive with precarious, daily, and informal jobs, or to resort to begging.
In Tunis, particularly in the northern suburbs, it’s a daily scene to see groups of migrants gathering at the roadside, hoping to be chosen for small daily jobs on construction sites or in gardens. This entirely informal system is now the only possibility for many, as testified by Sami, a 16-year-old Malian boy, and Abdallah, a 25-year-old Ivorian man, who live in daily anguish of being stopped and imprisoned for lacking regular documents.
Another witness, Sami, a 27-year-old man from Cameroon, arrived in Tunis with the expectation of finding employment as an electronics technician, but faced with the refusal of employers, he had to fall back on the work of ‘berbecha’, meaning a plastic collector. Every day he searches for bottles in the waste to resell them to recycling centers, an activity that barely allows him to pay rent and food.
The growing marginalization is also evident in the increasingly visible presence of mothers with children on the streets, forced to beg because they are unable to find employment. According to the Forum tunisien des droits économiques et sociaux, an NGO active in the area, the situation has reached levels of social emergency. Spokesperson Romdhane Ben Amor emphasizes that the criminalization of the work of NGOs and solidarity associations by the Tunisian state has contributed to precipitating the condition of migrants. Today, very few organizations are still able to operate concretely on the ground.This context has generated a spiral of exclusion, poverty, and social invisibility, in which the precariousness of migrants is intertwined with institutional repression and the crisis of civil society.
