For Algeria everything is just cheaper in here and protectionism barely lets anything in, we get paid less but it barely matters

US warmongering fucked them over really hard. The people are poor, but the land is rich, the wealth just flows away from the people and into the hands of US corporations.

There is also the neo-liberal policy of over-specialization from the colonial era which makes a country economically dependent on countries of Western European or Western European diaspora that do not follow their policy of over-specialization and which makes a country's economy highly instable to collapse of international market like the 2008 global recession.