Key role of families
Family pressures are indeed often decisive in the decision to emigrate. Take for instance Malik, 43, who left with his family, his idea being to provide a better environment for the children. “In Tunisia, the things you teach your children, such as putting their garbage in a trash bin, street life unravels them in five minutes,” he says with regret. Malik is one of many who have worked abroad before returning to settle in Tunisia. He came back in 2010 and at first he believed he’d done the right thing, but then he gave up, “worn out by the little things in life that make you crazy, like driving a car or the bureaucracy.” The same holds true for Yassine, father of five who plans to take his whole family with him as soon as the weather will allow, because “the cost of living is too high now and healthcare is out of reach.”
For younger people, their family is often the factor that pushed them out the door. Though Farès himself has never emigrated, he has a clear idea of the temptation : “You live in your family, you have a whole lot of things you can’t do in front of them, and they spend their time ordering you around, telling you not to do this or that, especially if you’re a girl. Well then, sure, going away is a good idea and once you discover what it’s like to be free, you can’t come back.” Zohra, an engineering student, shares this view. She has always seen emigration as the best way to escape an authoritarian family : “Ever since my secondary school diploma, I kept thinking of getting away and the most important reason was that in another country I’d have more freedom. Being female in a middle-class family imbued with archaic beliefs, I always had to resort to devious ploys to assert my identity.” Although parental authority and all the restrictions that go with it and have to be “subverted,” it remains an important motive for those who go abroad. At an age when a person wants to discover him/herself far from the limitations imposed by others, foreign lands become tantamount to a freedom difficult to imagine within one’s own family, not because that freedom is in any way special, but simply because of the geographical distance and the possibilities it has to offer.