Professor at New York University: “Anyone who has Black skin in this country is feeling a level of fear with many afraid and hiding in their homes”"

The country means is Tunisia. See Tunisian President Targets Sub-Saharan African Migrants, Mob Violence Follows by Chao Deng of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Tunisian authorities have arrested hundreds of sub-Saharan African migrants after President Kais Saied denounced immigration last month and said there was a “criminal plot” to change Tunisia’s demographic makeup.

Following the speech, groups of Tunisian men attacked dark-skinned migrants, assaulting some and chasing many from their homes. More than 100 migrants have fled to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration building in Tunis, the country’s capital.

“We were running for our lives,” said Erick Zawolo, a migrant from Liberia who said he ran from his apartment with his roommates to the U.N. building after a mob attacked them. Some of his friends have been arrested, he said.

Mr. Zawolo said he lost his clothes and 250 dinars, equivalent to $80, in savings the night of the attack and is now scraping by with bread, water and plastic sheets donated by strangers outside the U.N. building.

In the past year and a half, Mr. Saied, who was democratically elected in 2019, has dismantled parliament, reduced the independence of the judiciary and installed his own constitution. Human-rights groups and opposition politicians say Mr. Saied is waging an increasingly broad campaign of repression to score political points and detract from a deepening economic crisis in Tunisia and growing criticism of his authoritarian rule.

“What Kais Saied delivered was a great replacement speech in which he argued that pro-democracy political parties were engineering a great replacement of Arabs and Muslims with Black immigrants,” said Monica Marks, a professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi who specializes in Tunisian politics. “Anyone who has Black skin in this country is feeling a level of fear with many afraid and hiding in their homes.”"

"Roughly 840 migrants from Ivory Coast, Guinea, Cameroon and other African countries have been arrested and accused of staying illegally in the country since mid-February"

"Around 21,000 undocumented sub-Saharan African migrants live in Tunisia, according to official figures, of a population of 12 million. Several African nations including Mali, Ivory Coast and Guinea started repatriating their citizens in response to the surge in arrests and attacks. The African Union has condemned the Tunisian government’s comments on sub-Saharan Africans."