Special section introduction

Asian and Pacific Migration Journal

2020, Vol. 29(1) 3–11
Indonesia and circular ! Scalabrini Migration Center 2020
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labor migration: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0117196820925729
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and multi-directional
flows

Charanpal S. Bal
University of Western Australia

Wayne Palmer
Monash University

The World Bank estimated the number of documented and undocumented

Indonesian labor migrants to be nine million in 2016, equivalent to about 7
percent of the national labor force, with around 38 percent of them involved in
domestic and caregiving work (World Bank, 2017: 11). In 2019, Indonesia was
the third-largest migrant-sending country in East and Southeast Asia after
China and the Philippines (United Nations, 2019). Yet, at a time when circular
labor migration has become a key feature of the global political economy, it is
not the figures alone that make Indonesia a compelling case study to examine a
wide array of labor migration issues. The Indonesian experience offers useful
insights into understanding broader labor migration problems, namely, (1) the
problem of contested governance and transnational advocacy; (2) the oft-
debated links between remittances and development; and (3) issues arising
from the multi-directional nature of labor migration. This special section pro-
vides a close examination of these key global challenges in the Indonesian
context. In our introduction, we situate each of these issues within their broader

Corresponding author:
Charanpal S. Bal, Political Science and International Relations, University of Western Australia,
Crawley, Australia.
Email: charan.bal@uwa.edu.au
4 Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 29(1)

contexts and attendant debates. We then draw out the key contributions of each
paper and outline the implications these have for further research.

Contested governance and transnational advocacy

Everywhere, migration governance has consistently been found wanting in terms
of protecting the well-being and rights of temporary/circular labor migrants.
Historically, migrant labor governance frameworks have been driven by the
interests of policy-makers, employers and recruiters (Gerard and Bal, 2020).
Yet, these regulatory frameworks have come to be increasingly contested with
migrant labor non-government organizations (NGOs) at the forefront of pushing
for reforms. Consequent reforms, however, have been a mixed bag as competing
interests and social forces are constantly pushing against each other. While pro-
tections and rights-on-paper have increased, they have been secondary to
expanding overseas deployments of migrant workers (Bal and Gerard, 2018).
Indonesia is an interesting case in point, with governance frameworks
originating in the authoritarian New Order era (particularly from the early-
1980s) that saw labor ministry officials collaborating closely with labor
recruiters in order to promote the export of Indonesian labor overseas. This
occurred within a context that still exists in many sending-states today—
where domestic governments use overseas labor migration, and remittances
earned, to offset their inability to generate meaningful employment and social
protection for vast proportions of their citizens at home. The symbiotic rela-
tionship between the labor ministry (Kementerian Tenaga Kerja) and
recruiters had a telling impact on governance frameworks—highly slanted
in favor of recruiters with few, if any, effective protections for migrant work-
ers. Contested governance in Indonesia sees NGOs allied with the National
Agency for the Placement and Protection of Overseas Indonesian Workers
(Badan Nasional Penempatan dan Perlindungan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia or
BNP2TKI), a government organization especially established to administer
labor migration, and the foreign affairs ministry pushing for greater legal
protections, while recruiters in collaboration with the labor ministry actively
push back to preserve a recruiter-friendly environment (Palmer, 2016).
Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and networks of labor activism
(NOLAs) play key roles in seeking better protection of migrant workers.
These TANs and NOLAs are seen as vital in pushing for rights-based,
rather than economistic or securitized, models of governance. Transnational
imperatives for change are seen to be important as problems of exploitation
and abuse are not confined to national borders. For instance, poor protection
in recruitment contributes toward the precarity of migrant workers in
employment, while the lack of labor rights in host countries undermine devel-
opment outcomes of migration back home (Chan, 2018; Killias, 2018). Within
the Global South, TANs and NOLAs also allow for activists to circumvent
Bal and Palmer 5

illiberal politics and limited civil society spaces in certain recipient states
(particularly Singapore, Malaysia and the Gulf states) by ‘boomeranging’
struggles for rights to migrants’ home countries where greater freedom of
expression and association could be afforded (Ford and Piper, 2007).
Ezka Amalia’s article makes a contribution here by examining the activism
of the Indonesia-based NGO Migrant CARE and the Hong Kong-based
Indonesian Migrant Workers Union (IMWU). TANs/NOLAs that aim to
improve the protection of migrant rights in the Philippines-Hong Kong corridor
are widely seen as the gold standard for achieving that progressive change
(Ford and Piper, 2007). In comparison, Indonesian TANs/NOLAs are seen to
be found wanting despite some positive developments in recent years. On their
own, Migrant CARE and IMWU have made considerable strides in the last few
years in mobilizing public support for migrant rights and collectively mobiliz-
ing migrant workers. However, as Amalia reveals, they have done little of note
together by way of transborder organizing or advocacy.
In her article, Amalia shows that there are key differences in the way each
organization perceives pressing issues, and their respective strategies and
resources in acting on them. She demonstrates that these yet-unreconciled dif-
ferences arise from how different political opportunity structures in Indonesia
and Hong Kong impact the development of each organization, as well as how
activists have historically responded to varying challenges that different oppor-
tunity structures then present for transnational advocacy. As a result, Migrant
CARE and IMWU have significantly different support bases with divergent
strategies for alliance-building, particularly in relation to elite groups. While
Migrant CARE has sought to identify individual champions for migrant rights
among political-party elements running for public office, IMWU has eschewed
alliances with elites while building such relationships with organized labor.
Amalia’s findings have implications for how we understand the role of
civil society in contested governance. From a liberal view, common within
migration studies, civil society is understood as being comprised of organized
citizens mobilizing against the excesses of the state and the market. Such a
view tends to homogenize civil society where fractures are often seen as
aberrations or anomalies that can be addressed by an adherence to a
common rights-based approach. Using the theoretical concept of NOLA,
Amalia’s findings reveal deeper divisions that relate to varied structural con-
texts rather than a lack of commitment to migrant worker rights.

Remittances and development

A long-standing debate exists as to whether, or under what circumstances,
migration benefits migrant families and their communities. These concerns
originate from development debates between modernization/neoclassical
theory and dependency theory that stretch as far back as the Cold War-era
6 Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 29(1)

(Piore, 1979; Portes, 1978; Stahl, 1989). With the neoliberal turn from the
1990s, the importance of migration to development centered on the role of
remittances in delivering development outcomes (De Haas, 2005; Geiger and
Pecoud, 2013). Since then, temporary labor migration has been hailed as a
‘triple win’—receiving economies are able to alleviate labor shortages, send-
ing countries benefit from remittances and new skills return migrants bring
with them, while migrants benefit from a broader range of opportunities
(Castles and Ozkul, 2014; Gamlen, 2010). From this view, remittances can
drive development by alleviating poverty through the creation of sustainable
livelihood opportunities in sending countries (Cassarino, 2004).
The role of remittances is indeed significant. In the Philippines, they were
equivalent to 10.5 percent of GDP in 2017 (United Nations, 2017). In
Indonesia, the figure appears more modest—just equivalent to 1.1 percent
in 2018—but remittances have almost doubled from just over USD6 billion
in 2009 to just under USD12 billion in 2019 (World Bank, 2019). In particular,
remittances have been widely lauded by governments, international organi-
zations, academics and NGOs, for their potential in bypassing top-down aid
channels to directly benefit families and communities (Adams and Page, 2005;
Datta, 2009). Organizations, such as the World Bank, the United Nations and
the International Labour Organization, therefore, see migrants as active
agents of global wealth distribution through remittances (Raghuram, 2009:
107). Yet, such discourse rarely acknowledges the deleterious impacts of
migration, which seriously undermine the basic well-being of migrants, let
alone development outcomes. Critical migration scholars point to structural
inequalities, particularly gender and class inequalities, embedded within
migration systems to reveal how migrant well-being is undermined in recruit-
ment, work, and repatriation (Elias, 2010; Piper and Withers, 2018; Suliman,
2017). It is worth keeping in mind that, while considering the development
potential of remittances, migrant workers are subject to governance systems
highly slanted against their interests, and that constantly reproduce their vul-
nerability at every stage of the migration process.
In spite of these criticisms, remittances-development debates have contin-
ued to dominate. A key focus of these debates is that the way in which
remittances are used, whether for investment or consumption, determines
the extent to which remittances can promote development outcomes
(Adams and Cuecuecha, 2010; Zarate-Hoyos, 2004). The dominant view
here is that remittances used for investment, rather than for consumption,
bring about telling improvements to the lives of migrant workers, their fam-
ilies, their communities, and by extension, the local economy. Where migrants
are asset-poor, social capital—personal and kin-based networks, and informal
social institutions—take on a more crucial role in determining the extent to
which remittances can be converted into meaningful small-scale investments
(Borja, 2014; Kiboro, 2017). In this respect, not all forms of social capital have
Bal and Palmer 7

similar impacts, and the same type of social capital may have varying influ-
ence in different contexts.
Rulyusa Pratikto, Sylvia Yazid and Elisabeth Dewi wade into these debates
by attempting to unveil which specific types of social capital have a positive
influence on remittance-use. Their paper adopts an econometric model,
common in these studies, using data from the Indonesian Family Life
Survey of 2014 with samples drawn from key migrant-sending provinces.
The results were surprising, even to the authors themselves. It was revealed
that it was community meetings, youth group meetings and religious activ-
ities, rather than cooperatives, village savings and loans, and a government
handout program, that had a positive impact in turning remittances into
investments. These findings indicate that, in Indonesia, more formalized insti-
tutions are a long way off from realizing their intended goals of promoting
meaningful development to local communities. This has seen communities
turn toward institutions not primarily economic or developmental in nature
to forward their economic interests.
Moving forward, two key issues could be addressed in future research on
the remittances-development nexus. The first is the issue of structural vulner-
abilities. Migration systems, slanted heavily in favor of employers, recruiters
and policy-makers, leave migrant workers highly susceptible to a myriad of
problems such as debt-bondage, unpaid and underpaid wages, hefty recruit-
ment charges for changing employers and an overall lack of meaningful pro-
tections. These frequent occurrences have a striking impact on migrant
worker earnings, and therefore remittances, but are rarely ever accounted
for. The second issue is the gender dimension of remittances. While men
appear to make significant decisions on how remittances are used, migrant
women have shown a greater tendency to keep remittances to other women in
the family/kin-group. At the same time, social capital, a key conduit through
which remittances are translated into investments, are not evenly distributed.
Gender plays a key role in the distribution of social capital. Future studies
would do well to chart such inequalities in the way remittances are earned
and appropriated.

Multi-directional flows: When senders play host

Within migration studies, scholars often categorize countries according to a
neat binary that divides them into migrant-sending or migrant-receiving
countries even though most, if not all, countries are both ‘senders’ and
‘receivers’ of migrants (Palmer and Missbach, 2019). Several factors have
turned senders into receivers as well as making multi-directional flows
more noticeable. Typically, structural economic transformations in initially-
sending countries have created national labor-deficits, as labor-intensive
industries (notably in Malaysia and Thailand) seek cheap labor to compete
8 Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 29(1)

with emerging production centers with lower labor costs, such as China,
Cambodia and Bangladesh.
The Indonesian economy has not experienced similar structural shifts, but
several other factors have contributed to expanding the employment of
migrant labor in the country, including, for example, infrastructural invest-
ments by the People’s Republic of China, which often entail employment of
that country’s nationals. In such cases, the inflow of migrant workers into
traditionally-sending countries involves more than just direct employees of
Chinese firms and contractors. As recent revelations in the Philippines show,
these could lead to parallel inflows of undocumented migrant workers into
other sectors, such as gambling and sex work (Robles, 2020). In Indonesia, the
government’s official estimate of Chinese migrant workers is relatively low at
only 32,000 in 2019, but alarmist observers (falsely) claim the number is much
higher at ten million (Priyandita, 2018).
Another factor of note is the expansion of transboundary commercial fish-
ing, often illegal or unlicensed, into Indonesia waters (Palmer, 2018). By 2014,
Indonesia was identified as the largest site of illegal, unreported and unregu-
lated fishing (IUUF) in the world, accounting for 30 percent of the world’s
IUUF (Syafputri, 2014). A key aspect of IUUF is the prevalent use of undoc-
umented and trafficked migrant fishermen, which in turn, leads to a prolifer-
ation of such migrant workers into Indonesian borders that often bypasses
formal immigration controls. In 2015, the revelation of over 2,000 trafficked
fishermen in Ambon and Benjina, both in the province of Maluku, attracted
considerable domestic and international attention. It is very difficult to esti-
mate the scale of cross-border trafficking generally, but Ambon and Benjina
were two of the more significant ‘hotspots,’ where the Indonesian government
is routinely called on to ‘rescue’ and ‘assist’ migrant fishers trafficked for
exploitation in Indonesian waters.
Using the aforementioned Ambon and Benjina rescue missions as a case
study, Benni Yusriza examines Indonesian authorities’ commitment to pro-
tecting the rights of these victims of trafficking within their own borders.
Interestingly, his findings reveal that authorities’ interventions in Ambon
and Benjina were more about discrediting the already-beleaguered Thai fish-
ing industry, as Thai fishing vessels had long been suspected of IUUF in
Indonesian waters. Economic and immigration concerns were prioritized
over the rights and needs of victims, many of whom were repatriated without
opportunities to claim unpaid wages.
Yusriza’s analysis has clear implications for migration governance within
the context of multidirectional flows. Migration policies of governments that
see themselves as ‘senders’ are primarily emigration policies, which are often
heavily-geared toward exporting labor abroad. As a consequence then, a
blind-spot will predictably be governance structures that offer meaningful
protection to migrant workers in their midst. It was particularly telling that
Bal and Palmer 9

victims were seen by the Ministry of Fisheries as an opportunity to further

incriminate Thai fisheries, and by immigration authorities as overstayers to be
immediately repatriated, rather than workers subjected to slave-like working
conditions for a number of years.
Failure to protect migrant rights at home is not necessarily a result of
hypocrisy, as governments and rights groups demand better treatment of
their citizens living and working abroad. Other factors may be at play, includ-
ing that rights protection for foreign migrants at home is not a relatively high
policy priority, and that international development encourages these actors to
see themselves as ‘senders’ through technical and financial support for the
capacity-building it provides. This applies to migrant labor activists as much
as governments. While rights groups, leveraging on international treaties and
protocols, have the potential to put pressure on governments to deliver on
human rights protections, none were domestically mobilized in the Benjina
and Ambon cases. This suggests that advocacy groups within and advocacy
networks around Indonesia are similarly geared (as are organs of the state)
toward protecting workers from, rather than to, Indonesia.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publi-
cation of this article.

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