8 - Immigration Politics and State Transformation

Summary

Chapter 8 systematically compares immigration politics in Morocco and Tunisia and brings to the fore some striking continuities and parallels across democratic and autocratic contexts. I show that the state’s imperative to ensure its legitimation and sovereignty drives some of the key similarities in Moroccan and Tunisian immigration policymaking, such as the tendency to safeguard state power by creating exemption regimes or enacting changes informally. I also demonstrate that histories of state formation and official national identity narratives are key to understanding contemporary immigration politics in both countries. Lastly, I tease out how Morocco’s autocratization and Tunisia’s democratization affected the role, weight and interactions of state apparatus, civil society and external actors in immigration policy over the twenty-first century. I show that while the power of the executive and the weight of domestic political and civil society actors seem sensitive to a ’regime effect’, bureaucratic and international policy dynamics around immigration seem largely unaffected by political regime dynamics.