Tunisian diaspora

The Tunisian diaspora refers to people of Tunisian origin living outside that country. It is the direct result of the strong rate of emigration which Tunisia has experienced since its independence in 1956. In the 1960s and 70s, the favourable economic situation in France increased the phenomenon. The beginning of the 1980s saw the clear development of a Tunisian community in that country as a result of the large number of people (more than 22,000).

In 2012 the number of Tunisians residing abroad was numbered at 1,223,213 individuals, of which 84.4% were living in Europe. However, this official figure appears to be lower than reality because of the inadequate recording of migration statistics. Thus it is not rare to discover a single data point represents all the members of a family or to discover dublicates. Among the citizens which are underrepresented in the statistics are the third generation in France (according to one estimate, only one in ten of these have been recorded) and the children of mixed-race parents. The illegal immigrants (very numerous in Italy for example) are by definition not included in the official statistics.

625,864 have settled in France - one of the most important foreign communities in the country - and two thirds of them hold double citizenship. They are concentrated mostly in the large cities (40% in Paris, 12% in Lyons and 8% in Marseilles, with smaller communities in Nice, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Strasbourg, and Lille). Sonia Mabrouk connects this clumping phenomenon with the urban origin of the Tunisian migrants (Tunis and the littoral), but also with the nature of the different waves of migration. Thus the 1970s mainly saw the arrival of migrants from the south of Tunisia. These settled in the Rhône Valley and at Paris which offered the greatest number of opportunities for employment and created connections with their places of origin, which subsequently encouraged other migrants to settle in the same places. According to INSEE, 1.4% of children born in 2011 in Metropolitan France (i.e. 11,466 of 792,996) had a father born in Tunisia, with the greatest proportion in the departments of Alpes-Maritimes (8.6%), Var (4.5%), Seine-Saint-Denis (3.9%), Rhône (3.7%), Val-de-Marne (3.4%), and Bouches-du-Rhône (2.4%).

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