Democratization and Migrant Rights: Theory and Evidence from Tunisia

• In Event: Conflict and Division in the Public Opinion and Governance of Migration

Abstract

The EU has long depended on authoritarian states around the Mediterranean to reinforce its external border against migration flows. Before the Arab Spring, Tunisia was largely compliant in this regard: the autocratic Ben Ali regime took a draconian approach toward managing migration into and through Tunisia, characterized by arbitrary imprisonments and denial of the right to seek asylum.

In 2011, Tunisia’s widespread popular protests and subsequent democratization profoundly altered its political landscape. Ten years later, Tunisian citizens have seen new, if tenuous, opportunities to articulate their own rights through procedural democratic reforms. Meanwhile, migrants and refugees who reside in Tunisia remain subject to many of the same punitive security practices of the old regime.

This paper highlights the contrast between the evolving rights of Tunisian citizens and the stagnant status of resident non-citizens. In other words, when democratic transitions promise renewed rights for citizens, what becomes of the rights of the migrants and refugees who live alongside them? This paper examines Tunisia’s democratic transition and its implications for non-citizens, contextualizing them in a broader analysis about the relationship between democratization and migrant and refugee rights. It uses a combination of virtual interview and archival research in the Tunisian case and cross-national comparative data about migrant and refugee rights in new democracies.

In comparative perspective, this paper considers the conditions under which democratization could be the impetus for broader inclusion or exclusion of migrants and refugees, and the conditions under which democratization has little effect on migration policy at all – as has happened in Tunisia. I argue that refugee policy outcomes can be explained in a two-level game framework, which considers both international and domestic forces that influence migration policy outcomes. Along domestic lines, I suggest that new democracies’ migration policies may be determined by the composition of coalitions that come into power during the transitional period. Along international lines, change or stasis in migration policy may be conditioned by the degree of linkages a new democracy has with a powerful neighbor that has securitized migration policy (as in the US or EU).

Author

• Elizabeth Davis, Syracuse University