Indonesia and circular labor migration: Governance,remittances and multi-directional flows

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 protections 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 relationship 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 workers. 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 development outcomes of migration back home (Chan, 2018; Killias, 2018). Within the Global South, TANs and NOLAs also allow for activists to circumvent 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 mobilizing 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 differences 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 opportunity 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 contexts 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 (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 Pécoud, 2013). Since then, temporary labor migration has been hailed as a ‘triple win’—receiving economies are able to alleviate labor shortages, sending 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 organizations, 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 recruitment, 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 vulnerability at every stage of the migration process.

In spite of these criticisms, remittances-development debates have continued 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 families, 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 similar impacts, and the same type of social capital may have varying influence 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 activities, 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 institutions 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 vulnerabilities. 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 recruitment charges for changing employers and an overall lack of meaningful protections. 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 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 investments 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 fishing, often illegal or unlicensed, into Indonesia waters (Palmer, 2018). By 2014, Indonesia was identified as the largest site of illegal, unreported and unregulated 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 undocumented and trafficked migrant fishermen, which in turn, leads to a proliferation 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 estimate 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 protecting 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 fishing 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 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, including 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.