In 2024, 53,000 Tunisians joined the ranks of new OECD immigrants, compared with 46,000 a year earlier. This 15% rise lifts Tunisia three places in the ranking of the fifty largest origin countries, with an expatriation rate of 4.3 per thousand inhabitants.
Behind these figures lies a question that migration statistics rarely pose: what is the value, for an economy, of human capital that now earns its wealth elsewhere?
Italy, the new frontier of Tunisian mobility
It is toward Italy that the curve has risen the most. Arrivals of Tunisian nationals there reached 18,300 in 2024, compared with 12,600 in 2023 and 3,700 in 2014.
Among the fifteen top origin countries, Tunisia records the strongest increase in flows to Italy in 2024, with 5,700 additional people. The country now counts 123,800 residents of Tunisian nationality, compared with 96,000 in 2015, and 5,189 Tunisians had acquired Italian citizenship there in 2024.
These data come from the International Migration Outlook 2026, the fiftieth edition published by OECD Publishing (Paris). The report does not contain a chapter dedicated to Tunisia: the figures cited here come from its statistical annexes, its country notes and its thematic chapters, and the reading proposed from the perspective of the country of origin is that of this article, not that of the OECD.
France remains the historical anchor. Tunisians, together with Algerians and Moroccans, form the top trio of new arrivals in 2024, with 13,300 entries, after 14,700 in 2023 and 16,900 in 2022. The population born in Tunisia in France exceeds 500,000 in 2025, up from 398,000 in 2015, and 7,250 Tunisians obtained French citizenship in 2024.
The productivity mirror
The report poses an unusual question for a migration-focused document: does immigration help or hinder productivity? Immigrants account for 16% of employment in the OECD, three percentage points more than ten years ago, while the working-age population in the area is expected to shrink by 8% by 2060. One in five graduates in science and engineering fields was born abroad.
For host countries, Tunisia is a reservoir of skills; for Tunis, the same statistic reads as a transfer of productive potential. The central conclusion of the report remains valuable: immigration is not inherently favorable nor unfavorable to productivity; it depends on integration policies and the functioning of the labor market.
When skills go unused
