The politics of demography

The politics of demography Behind Tunisia’s panicked headlines about falling birth rates is the darker demand that reproduction itself be policed in the name of racial purity. Over the month of April, multiple headlines announced a “decline in marriages” and an “increase in divorces,” proclaiming with alarm that the institution of marriage was in crisis, that Tunisian women had become too fixated on their careers to care for families, that there were fewer childbirths and more abortions, and that the falling fertility rates may no longer replace the aging Tunisian population. Since then, these “crises” have become a site of intense political debates. Asma Jabri, the minister of Family, Women, Children and the Elderly, called for the state to urgently implement a strategic plan to help Tunisians “prepare for their married life.” For her, improving “positive communication” between the husband and the wife was all that was needed to preserve the institution of marriage and magically bring the fertility rates up; the weight of rising living costs, stagnating incomes, and growing unemployment were secondary in Jabri’s explanation of the demographic shifts. As I scroll through discussions over these “crises” on Facebook, I wonder if the ghost that haunts the Tunisian mind is not only the fear of a shrinking population but also the society’s “colonization” by sub-Saharan migrants, threatening to make Tunisia black. Since the pandemic in 2020, the belief that Tunisia was becoming “African”—as black migrants are ironically called across North Africa—has seeped into conversations across cafés, WhatsApp groups, and social media. Sitting next to me in a café in Tunis back in 2022, Riadh, a Tunisian man in his 70s, told me with fear that “in about 20years, the Tunisian population will be majority black since the Africans are arriving in mass and the Tunisians are suffering from a crisis of values.” Like him, many Tunisians I spoke with said that all the good Tunisian men were migrating to Europe, that the black sub-Saharan men were luring away all the good Tunisian women so that they could multiply into black children, that black women and men were too sexual and too fertile, and that a million of them were already colonizing Tunisia. This empirically empty logic was later espoused by Tunisian President Kais Saied in 2023, describing the black migration as “a criminal arrangement that has been prepared since the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” And these ideas continue to circulate, in spite of evidence that this migrant population has never exceeded 50,000. The demand for dignity—a revolutionary call that filled Tunisia’s streets in 2011—has been desecrated by the governing elite to mean the preservation of state sovereignty and purity, as scholar Nadia Marzouki has noted. And what is emerging over the last three years is that sovereignty has become synonymous with reproducing racially pure Tunisians—Arab and Muslim rather than African, as President Saied himself put it. The political intent to annihilate the black migrant population, be it by expelling them into the desert lands in Algeria and Libya or drowning them in the sea, is also the one that is coercing Tunisian women to stay in their marriages, however violent they may be, with the hope that this would lead to more childbirths. And the duty of preserving Tunisia’s sovereignty has fallen onto the bodies of women: on Tunisian women to act as reproductive citizens, and on black migrant women to control their excess sexuality. This obsession with racial dynamics of reproduction is neither new nor confined to black migrants alone, as many black Tunisian citizens often told me. Starting from their childhood, black Tunisians—who make up between 10 and 15 percent of the total population—are socialized into the racial lines that separate who they can love and marry, with racial endogamy being the norm. Marriages between black and non-black Tunisians lead to fantasies about the skin-color of the future children, with non-black families often praying that their “family blood doesn’t turn into black savages.” In the case of black migrants, endogamy is not only expected but it is hoped that they do not reproduce at all and that they disappear without any trace. The moment reproduction becomes a question of sovereignty, any state control over women’s bodies becomes morally justified. In Tunisia, political rhetoric calling for this control is already growing; while Jabri suggests schooling women in family values to coerce them into childbirth, parliamentarian Fatima el-Masdi has called for the state implementation of a “radical solution” whereby birth control will be forced onto black migrant women. The increasingly explicit project of racial purity opens the possibility of state-sanctioned reproductive control, with policies that have dangerous historical precedents. For example, el-Masdi’s suggestions can be used to justify forced sterilization of black migrant women, similar to those carried out by the Nazi German regime on women they considered racially inferior or biologically flawed. In addition, calls for coercing childbirth among Tunisian women can justify the dismantling of family-planning services, including legal access to abortion and contraception that Tunisian feminists have fought for since the country’s independence. Trends towards these alarming prospects are already visible in Tunisia. For example, in 2013, parliamentarian Najiba Berioul proposed to criminalize abortion, employing Islamic pro-life arguments similar to those found among Christian conservatives in the United States. And while the 1973 law guaranteeing access to abortion remains in place today, medical staff often pressure women to continue unwanted pregnancies. In parallel, the state has sought to control migrant reproduction by making it difficult for pregnant migrants to access medical care in spite of the universal right to health care enshrined in the Tunisian law. These difficulties include racially discriminatory behavior from medical staff, language barriers, as well as the fear of getting deported. Often, these black women give birth in makeshift migrant camps without any medical assistance. While the conceptual fluidity between individual dignity and national sovereignty has derailed the democratization project towards racial nationalism, this fluidity may paradoxically serve as “an enduring resource for democratic revival,” in the words of Marzouki. Today, the deadly border infrastructure that Tunisia is expanding in the name of sovereignty kills not only black migrants but also Tunisians who dare to imagine their own freedom of movement. This shared human condition can itself become a site to claim collective dignity, as the “kulna muhajirun” (“we are all migrants”) banner that led the march against racism on June 20, 2026, already demonstrates.