Managing the Unemployment and Supporting the Economy in Iraq Through the Institutionally-regulated Emigration: Evidence from Tunisia

It might be clear to most people that individuals leave their countries and seek a better life in other countries, which usually happens for many reasons. Some of them are related to security conditions—e.g., wars and instability—high rates of unemployment, and family unification—e.g., marriage. This type of movement is called emigration. Although it has negative effects on the sending countries, such as what is called “brain drain,” it also carries some benefits at the individual and the institutional levels, especially for the countries that suffer from high rates of unemployment and chronic weak economies. In this situation, the governments sometimes prepare a segment of their citizens—usually low-skilled people—to emigrate through vocational training. “Exporting” those people to their destinations requires pre-established agreements with those destinations that lack such labor. That process avoids both sides of the agreement and the problems of irregular migration and supports both economies in different ways.

The Theory and Its Implications:

The migration theory refers to the process in which people move from one country to another one or within the country. Regarding the first type, people sometimes are forced to seek safe havens due to the conditions of instability in their home countries, such as wars, domestic violence, and civil war. Also, weak economies force people to seek a better life in rich countries, whether those countries are in the same region or in another continent. For example, during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, there was a massive and uncontrolled wave of migrants who reached Europe through Turkey of the Mediterranean. As a result, millions of people from Asia and Africa landed mostly in Italy, Spain, and Greece. Also, in 2019, there were hundreds of thousands of people marched from poor Latin American countries toward the United States of America—later that wave was controlled by Mexico due to the regulations of the 1996 agreement with the US.