The presence of people on the move in the Tunisian economy is an open secret. A senior diplomat at a sub-Saharan African nation’s embassy told me that she was recently tempted to surreptitiously snap a picture of a Tunisian police car being washed by three men without legal migratory status, due to the blatant hypocrisy of the situation: while their presence may be anathema, their affordable labor is welcome.

Spatial centrality often shows an inverse correlation with the visibility of non-Tunisian’s work. In restaurants in Centreville, people on the move more frequently work in less visible positions, washing dishes in the back or cleaning after restaurants close. In these more central environs, the people on the move making a living who are visible are mothers with young children begging in high foot-traffic areas, and their visibility makes them more susceptible to sporadic immigration enforcement, should it occur.

The gendered dimension of migration enforcement also catalyzes changes in familial breadwinner dynamics. People tell me of apparent targeting of Black men, specifically, in migration status checks. Domestic tensions can arise among displaced families resulting from women working as nannies or maids while their male partners describe feeling almost trapped at home. In the urban periphery, such as El Aouina, Ariana, and La Soukra, people on the move occupy more visible roles in the economy, sometimes working as servers in cafés or assistants in garages. However, these peripheral locations where higher concentrations of people on the move work and live are also where immigration enforcement actions such as raids and document checks are more likely to occur.

It would be wrong to say that there is pervasive animosity towards non-Tunisians without legal status working in the Tunisian economy, with one Cameroonian man introducing me to his Tunisian colleagues in a café in Ennassr as they laugh and joke together. Yet, it is undeniable that migratory status influences power dynamics in Tunisian workplaces. A Syrian man without legal status, who is able to work in a more visible role closer to the urban center due to his white skin and his Arabic fluency that many francophone West African people on the move lack, explained his employment situation and his difficult relationship with his boss to me. To keep his job, he must work 14 hours days, six days each week, for which he is paid between 700 and 750 TND total per month (~$250), depending on tips. He rents a room that is an hour’s walk from his workplace, and pays 600TND per month, without a formal rental contract, because such an official agreement is impossible without legal migratory status. He carefully allocates the remaining 100 – 150 TND (~$35-50) to ensure it lasts the whole month, eating one meal each day, consisting of two eggs and a piece of bread. For him, this wage is still an improvement from the previous wage he earned of 10TND (~$3) per day, or 300 TND (~$100) per month.

While we are speaking, his boss calls him and tells him that he will need to come back and work an extra 30 minutes, because he had arrived 15 minutes late that morning. He tells me that his precarity gives him insomnia, as he cannot sleep at night because he worries about his future, so he had trouble leaving his house at 6am that morning to arrive at work by 7. He opens his phone and shows me a long string of messages from his boss, chastising him for having left an ashtray on a table after a customer left. He says he can’t contest these unreasonable demands, because he is afraid to lose job. He tells me about a period when he was homeless, after a previous housing arrangement unexpectedly evaporated. He had asked his boss to allow him to sleep in the café for a day or two until he could find a new place to live. His boss told him that he could not permit him to sleep there, so he slept on the street.

In the current Tunisian economy, many Tunisians themselves also work under pressure. A Tunisian server in a café in the medina tells me that he works seven days per week, for 30 TND per day (~$10), but he is permitted to sleep in the café where he works at night. He bemoans to me that the grand majority of the Tunisian economy is controlled by a small number of unimaginably wealthy families. While we chat, another Tunisian man overhears our conversation and stands up from his table to walk over and show me his Italian ID card from his own journey. A different Tunisian bricklayer who had previously crossed the Mediterranean to Italy before being deported earns the same salary of 30TND per day. Harraga (حراقة), the derja word for burning that refers to both a burning desire to leave and physically burning one’s identity documents before departing, is intractably linked to people’s perceived paucity of economic opportunity.

Everyone is talking about rising costs of living. One taxi driver tells me that he would have more children, if the cost of living wasn’t so high. Another taxi driver tells me that had divorced and that he would re-marry, if he had enough money, but it is hard to save enough to re-marry with rising costs. This focus on personal economic struggles can mean that people focus less on the government’s treatment of migrant populations, on the repression of civil society groups, and on the restriction of civil liberties.