Tunisian President Kais Saied has been criticised for stating that mass illegal immigration is a “criminal enterprise” directed toward changing the demographics of his country.
President Saied made his comments this week at a meeting of the country’s National Security Council, calling for action to deal with the influx of illegal immigrants arriving from sub-Saharah Africa, which he labelled as “hordes.”
The Tunisian leader went on to blame illegals for being a source of violence, crime and “unacceptable acts”, stating that illegal migration was a “criminal enterprise hatched at the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia,” newspaper Le Figaro reports.
According to President Saied, mass illegal immigration risked transforming Tunisia, which is also a major departure point for illegals looking to reach Europe, into an “African only” country and changing its “Arab-Muslim” character.
“Those who are at the origin of this phenomenon are trafficking in human beings while claiming to defend human rights,” he said.
Several pro-migration groups and activists have slammed the Tunisian president’s remarks including Romdhane Ben Amor, the spokesperson for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, who said, “It is a racist approach just like the campaigns in Europe.”
“The presidential campaign aims to create an imaginary enemy for Tunisians to distract them from their basic problems,” Amor added.
Other NGOs have denounced rising levels of “hate speech” in Tunisia and have called on the government to “fight against hate speech, discrimination and racism against them and to intervene in emergencies to guarantee the dignity and rights of migrants.”
President Saied’s comments echo those of politicians in Europe who have invoked the theory of the Great replacement, a term to describe purposeful rapid demographic change, coined by French writer Renaud Camus.
“For one thing there is no such thing as a ‘theory’ of Great Replacement. Great Replacement is a dire and sinister fact, not a theory,” Mr Camus told Breitbart News last month, speaking on the occasion of his account being restored on Twitter.
In recent years, several prominent politicians and political candidates have explicitly referenced the Great Replacement, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban who stated last year that the west was “experimenting with the programme of great replacement.”
While many who criticise Camus and his theory have long claimed it as a “white supremacist conspiracy theory,” other non-European parts of the globe have also been affected by demographic-changing levels of mass migration.
In 2018, an MP for the French overseas department of Mayotte, located off the coast of Mozambique, noted that illegal immigrants had displaced the native islanders, making them a minority in their own country.
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