The Shape of Borders to Come: On the EU and Tunisia Immigration Deal
by Jose Rosales — 28August2023
A Blueprint of the Future
The European Union has agreed to assist Tunisia via financial investments in infrastructure, support in passing new budgetary reforms (the terms and final decision of which remains in the hands of the Tunisian government), given Tunisia’s willingness to collaborate in further “securing” EU borders by curtailing the number of refugees/asylum seekers/migrants that arrive in Europe from Tunisian ports. For 2023 alone, the price of such an agreement has been set to the tune of €1.5 billion. On July 16, the EU and Tunisia signed a “memorandum of understanding on a strategic and comprehensive partnership,” with the intended purpose of “combating ‘irregular’ migration, economic development” and even “renewable energy.” Speaking alongside Italian PM, Giorgia Meloni, and Dutch PM, Mark Rutte at the Tunisian Presidential Palace, European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen hailed the deal as both “a template” and “a blueprint for the future, for partnerships with other countries in the region.”
Despite the promise of €900 million contingent upon the result of talks between Tunisian President, Kais Saied, and the IMF, the European Commission will begin providing the North African State with €675 million — €150 million of which is designated for “immediate support.” Included, as well, is an additional €105 million intended to “combat and reduce irregular migratory flows and save human lives.” As expressed in the language of the memorandum itself, “This approach will be based on respect for human rights and will include the fight against criminal networks of migrant smugglers and human traffickers, within the framework of the enhanced operational partnership against migrant smuggling and human trafficking, announced in April 2023.”
However, just one day after the signing of this joint agreement, video footage was released of Tunisian authorities forcibly relocating approximately “800 African migrants to the border with Libya, a place in the middle of the desert” — leaving them with neither supplies nor shelter — while another group of migrants were taken by authorities to the Tunisian-Algerian border. Abandoned to the country’s deserts bordering Libya and Algeria, Tunisian authorities effectively condemned migrants to survive “under similarly life-threatening conditions.”
On July 31, Libya’s Interior Ministry announced the discovery of six more bodies of refugees at the border with Tunisia, while suggesting that the most likely cause of death was from hunger. Responding to criticism from various EU member states, a spokesperson from the EU told Al Jazeera that the EU will not be retracting the €1.5 billion in aid. On the very next day (August 3), Libyan border guards discovered the decomposed bodies of two migrants near its border with Tunisia.
With a helping hand from both the EU and IMF, having abandoned migrants in the middle of the desert where death arrives by hunger and thirst, Kais Saied clarified how he plans to satisfy his commitment to “combat ‘irregular’ migratory flows” and “save human lives.” Thus, one wonders how the Tunisian President will use the €105 million allocated for “curbing migration” — for unlike the fences and surveillance infrastructure of the most modern of migrant detention centers, in the desert, there are neither fences, nor cameras, nor guards. €105 million, then, is not the cost of detention centers and the latest identificatory processing systems. It is the price of a gratuitous misery that, through no fault of their own, African migrants are now forced to undergo.
EU Migration Policy and Other Misfortunes
In 1998, Italy’s center-left government passed the country’s first “systems of flows decrees” enshrining the use of quotas for the processing of persons arriving from North Africa via the Mediterranean. With this piece of legislation, “Flows decrees” enacted a set of bilateral relations where Italy and a partnered country operate under the shared rubric setting a definite quota regarding “legal” entry of “workers.” However, as sociologist Roberto Calarco explains, “flow decrees have been exploited…to obtain cooperation in containing ‘irregular’ migration and building up…border controls.” As regards the lasting effects of “flows decrees”, there is perhaps no better place to turn than Tunisia. Beginning with the 98 legislation, Italy and Tunisia signed their first “readmission agreement” and in exchange for more quotas for Tunisian citizens, Italy was guaranteed Tunisia’s cooperation in “controlling ‘irregular’ migration.” From 1999 to 2004 — i.e., immediately after this first iteration of Italy’s ‘flows decrees’ — the strait of Sicily would become the most frequently crossed Italian sea border.
However, along with the 2011 Arab Spring and the 60,000 Tunisian citizens who arrived in Italy in the aftermath, Europe proved itself unable to adequately address the 2014–15 “refugee crisis” with the then-new “hotspot approach” — an approach intended to expedite identification and fingerprinting at specific sites managed by state and non-state actors. That is to say, regardless of ever more draconian measures of EU migration policies, in the eyes of the EU and especially the Italian State, neither the Arab Spring nor the Syrian Civil War were sufficient conditions for granting refugees and asylum seekers a “permit of stay.” What is more, Calarco’s research found North African, and especially Tunisian, migrants as those most likely to be considered “economic migrants” and, thus, repatriated. Speaking with Al Jazeera English regarding recent migrant deaths at the Tunisian-Libyan border, Eleonora Milazzo, a joint research fellow at the European Policy Centre and the Egmont Institute in Brussels, noted how, in 2017, Italy entered into a similar deal with Libya in 2017, which is financed, in part, by the EU ‘Emergency Trust Fund for Africa’ program, ‘Support to Integrated border and migration management in Libya’.
According to the 2017 Memorandum of Understanding of Migration (MoU) signed by both Italy and Libya, which was renewed for an additional three years in 2020, “Italy and the EU have been helping the Libyan Coastguard to enhance their maritime surveillance capacity, providing them with financial support and technical assets. Since 2017, Italy has set aside €32.6 million for international missions to support the Libyan Coastguard, with €10.5 million allocated in 2021.” As Medecins sans Frontieres recently reported, “The MoU is part of a broader defensive strategy being pursued by European governments, based on a security approach against migrants. Rather than giving migrants protection, it seeks to keep them out.” Meanwhile, and despite “overwhelming evidence of abuses and pushbacks, that deal still holds.”
As journalist Simon Speakman Cordall recently put it: “In return for intercepting potential refugees and migrants at sea and returning them to Libya, Rome provided Libyan militias the financial and technical support that would allow them to police the North African country’s borders. In May this past year, investigators for the UN accused the EU of complicity in funding the groups responsible for the “murder, torture and rape” of refugees and migrants trapped in Libyan detention centers.” While details have yet to be made public, as of August 10, Tunisia and Libya have announced a joint agreement on relocating refugees from the desert border for both countries.
The shape of borders to come
Regardless of each new decree or migration policy reform, North African and Tunisian migrants have been consistently denied permits of stay at significantly higher rates than other migrants who arrived and were processed by the Italian State. This, Calarco explains, is due the continuous assessment of migrants from North Africa and Tunisia via the categories of “voluntary” and “forced” migration — the founding distinction that then legitimates every attempt to define “economic” migration as a matter of individual choice, if not preference.
For the EU, individuals who migrate to the EU for “economic” reasons — i.e., reasons pertaining to their inability to meet their basic level of subsistence needs — have no justifiable basis upon which asylum/refugee/stay requests are granted. Thus, ever since the passage of Italy’s ‘flows decrees’, both Italy and the EU have remained active participants in continuously refining the forms of “expulsion, containment, and abandonment.” Whenever expulsion, containment, and abandonment comprise governmental border policy, the very discourse of “migration policy” — new or old — becomes so many euphemisms for the shape of misery to come.
