Other countries aren’t as welcoming to foreign migrants as the United States, where progressive cities sometimes house them in luxury hotels at taxpayer expense.
In Tunisia, a mostly white Arab country in North Africa, citizens got tired of the migrants coming to their country from black African countries and responded by attacking them on the streets, while their government began expelling the migrants.
Tunisians’ anger spilled over after three migrants were detained in the death of a local man in the port city of Sfax. Security forces took harsh reprisals against Black foreigners, expelling masses of them. Tunisians view black African migrants as the cause of rising crime.
Around a thousand migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were pushed into a dangerous no-man’s-land on the border between Tunisia and Libya and trapped for a week there without access to basic necessities. Libya is undergoing its own civil war. Later, Tunisia allowed at least 500 of them to return from the no-man’s land.
Two further groups of black African refugees, including children, remain trapped in the militarized border zone. A group of around 150 people trapped there said they were dumped in the border zone on Tuesday after Tunisian police had beaten them. They say they have had no access to food or water for several days.
In addition to those expelled to the Tunisia-Libya border, a larger number of black migrants were taken by bus from the port city of Sfax to the desert frontier with Algeria. Two bodies of Black refugees have since been recovered from the area.
Animosity toward people from black Africa skyrocketed after the death of a local man in Sfax on July 3, with many Black migrants forced to flee the city amid violence targeted against them.
Despite the arrest of three migrants from Cameroon for the man’s killing and the expulsion of hundreds of Black refugees to the country’s borders, anger at unauthorized migrants continues to rise in Tunisia.
In Sfax, more than 9 days since violence first flared, public parks still host crowds of refugees, sheltering from the intense July heat.
Black men with bandages described being beaten and attacked with machetes, and then forcibly driven from their homes.
Earlier this year, Tunisia’s President Kais Saied decried the “hordes of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan Africa” coming to Tunisia, which he said spread “violence, crime and unacceptable practices” and would alter the nation’s demographics.
Street violence followed Saied’s speech. Black migrants were beaten and in some cases rendered homeless.
Tunisia has received little foreign criticism for its mass expulsions of migrants and refugees, despite foreign rights groups saying that violated international human-rights treaties.
The European Commission is instead mulling an aid package worth $1.2 billion to shore up Tunisia’s economy and better police its borders.
