What a Tunisian exodus says about the future of global migration
When he clings to the outside of a fourth-story apartment, applying another coat of white paint under the glare of Tunis’ sun, or when he lies on his cot in the dark corner of an urban vegetable stand, Salih Barqoushi thinks of home, his “paradise.”
It is so vivid, he can almost touch it. Walls of prickly pear cactus reach 7 feet high. Rolling hills of millennial olive and almond trees flex their knotted branches. Echoes of laughing children bounce across the fertile blood-red soil. Chickens and quails scurry about, all under a low-hung, bright-blue sky that seems to never end.
“It is the most beautiful land; it was the most beautiful life,” Mr. Barqoushi says as he lingers near a Tunis train station hoping to be picked up for a job. His village is called Al-Ala, Arabic for “the highest.”
Mr. Barqoushi had the highest of hopes in early 2011, like many Tunisians, when a democratic revolution demanding “dignity, social justice” ended decades of dictatorship. The new popularly elected assembly vowed to lift up rural communities after the ousting of authoritarian strongman President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who for nearly 25 years directed resources away from Tunisia’s rural interior to its coastal cities. At last, farmers like Mr. Barqoushi could more than get by; they could flourish.
He married and moved into the house he was born in and bought a dozen sheep to produce milk and cheese. He rolled up his sleeves to expand his family’s rain-fed olive farm with crops such as bell peppers and tomatoes, wheat and barley.
“We thought our lives would get better,” he says.
The first setback came in 2014 when the rains stopped. His barley and wheat dried up, forcing him to purchase animal feed for his flock. After two years of rising feed prices, he was forced to sell off his sheep. By 2017, his vegetables were requiring year-round irrigation, costing more than $450 dinars, about $150, per month, and production was halved. After trying his hand at low-paying jobs in the village, scraping $8 a day, he decided he needed to leave his home, farm, wife, and children to relocate to the capital, Tunis, 125 miles away. He works as a construction day laborer painting buildings. On a good day, he earns $16 for 10 hours of work.
Mr. Barqoushi is singularly focused on what he believes is the only path to returning home, reuniting with his family, revitalizing his farm, and reversing his fortunes – a path that runs 100 meters below the earth.
If only he could tap the receding underground aquifer, he says, he could make his farm thrive.
“I wouldn’t leave my home for a single day if I had water. All I need is a well,” he says, shaking his head. “If I only had a well.”
At the current rate, it would take Mr. Barqoushi over a decade to save up the $10,000 needed to dig a 100-meter (330-foot) well.
Climate is just one factor driving migrants from their homes
Around the world, a trio of global crises – political instability, inequality, and climate change – is increasingly driving families from homes, villages, and even countries.
The causes of this mass movement of humans are intertwined and, like the statistics themselves, complicated. They are also accelerating. The share of refugees and asylum-seekers from regions threatened by climate change, for instance, has jumped from 61% in 2010 to 84% in 2022, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
In few places can one observe this collision as clearly as in Tunisia. Here, in this Mediterranean African country, people are experiencing the autocratic relapse of the world’s youngest democracy, hyperinflation thanks to decades-old economic mismanagement, and temperatures warming at twice the global rate, coupled with historic drought.
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