Unequal borders: Indonesian transnational migrants at immigration control

Geopolitics

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 265-279

  Silvey, Rachel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AIRPORT; IMMIGRATION; LABOR MIGRATION; MIGRANT WORKER; REPATRIATION;

ASIA; EURASIA; INDONESIA; JAKARTA; SOUTHEAST ASIA;

EID: 43249132594     PISSN: 14650045     EISSN: 15573028     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14650040601168917     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Sri S. Wahyudi, Kejahatan Terorganisasi terhadap TKI pada tahap Pemulangan dari Luar Negeri dan Penanganannya oleh Polri (Organized Crime faced by Indonesia Workers at their Homecoming and Securitization by the Indonesian Police), unpublished MA thesis, Program Studi Kajian Ilmu Kepolisian, Program Pascasarjana (Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia 2002).
2. T. R. Krisnawaty, R. Tagaroa, E. Indriati, Y. B. Wibawa, A. Muchsin, A. Khusnaeni, T. Kuswandari, K. Chandrakirana, P. Trimayuni, and G. Achnas, Buruh Migran Pekerja Rumah Tangga Indonesia (TKWPRT): Kerentanan dan Inisiatif-Inisiatif Baru untuk Perlindungan Hak Asasi TKW-PRT (Indonesian Overseas Migrant Domestic Workers: Sensitivity and New Initiatives for the Protection of the Human Rights of Overseas Migrant Domestic Workers), Report for the UN Special Rapporteur on Migrant Human Rights (Jakarta: Komnas Perempuan [National Commission for Women's Human Rights] 2003).
3. Ibid.
4. Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey 2005).
5. Matthew Sparke, In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005).
6. On Indonesia, see Anna L. Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993).
7. On border theory more generally, see Chris Rumford, 'Introduction: Theorizing Borders', European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006) pp. 155-169.
8. A. J. Bailey, R. A. Wright, A. Mountz, and I. Miyares. '(Re)producing Salvadoran Transnational Geographies', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92/1 (2002) pp. 125-144.
9. Das and Poole (note 4).
10. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1998).
11. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005)
12. M. H. Amster, 'The Rhetoric of the State: Dependency and Control in a Malaysian-Indonesian Borderland', Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12 (2005) pp. 23-43
13. Tania Li, 'Beyond "the State" and Failed Schemes', American Anthropologist 107/3 (Sep. 2005) pp. 383-394.
14. Caroline Nagel. 'Questioning Citizenship in an Age of Migration', in John O'Loughlin, Lynn Staeheli, and Edward Greenberg (eds.), Globalization and Its Outcomes (New York and London: Guilford 2004).
15. On the spatiality of the contemporary Indonesian state, see Joshua Barker, 'Engineers and Political Dreams', Current Anthropology 46/ 5 (2005) pp. 703-727.
16. See also Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005).
17. Douglas Massey, 'International Migration at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: The Role of the State', Population and Development Review 25/2 (1999) pp. 303-334.
18. Peter Vandergeest and Nancy Peluso, p. 387, as cited in Tania Murray Li, 'Engaging Simplifications: Community-Based Resource Management, Market Processes and State Agendas in Upland Southeast Asia', World Development 30/2 (2002) p. 273.
19. Vandergeest and Peluso are examining the modern nationstate and its strategies of governance. In contrast, I am interested here in the way that the state works on citizens returning from abroad.
20. Massey (note 13) pp. 303-304.
21. Massey (note 13) p. 315 also examines research that addresses which factors affect the levels of restrictiveness of immigration policy. Still, the analysis of "the state" in his conceptualisation is reduced to government policy. State capacity vis-à-vis migration is measured in terms of the "strength of the bureaucracy," the "demand for entry," the "strength of constitutional protections," the "independence of the judiciary," and the "tradition of immigration."
22. Ibid., p 318.
23. Gerard ÓTuathail, Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996).
24. T. Perreault, 'Changing Places: Transnational Networks, Ethnic Politics, and Community Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon', Political Geography 22/1 (2003) pp. 61-88.
25. Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1990).
26. Alison Mountz, 'Embodying the nation-state: Canada's response to human smuggling', Political Geography 23/3 (2004) pp. 323-345.
27. While gender is not the central analytic of this article, for feminist political geographers working within this general theoretical orientation, an analytical priority has been to explore transnationalism as a gendered set of dynamics that are located in specific geo-historical contexts of inequality. See Richa Nagar, Victoria Lawson, Linda McDowell and Susan Hanson, 'Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization', Economic Geography 78/3 (2002) pp. 257-284.
28. Tania Li, 'Beyond 'the State' and Failed Schemes,' American Anthropologist 107/3 (2005) p. 384.
29. Daromir Rudnyckyj, 'Technologies of Servitude: Governmentality and Indonesian Transnational Labor Migration Assimilation', Anthropological Quarterly 77 (2004) pp. 407-434.
30. Rachel Silvey, 'Stigmatized Spaces: Moral Geographies under Crisis in South Sulawesi, Indonesia', Gender, Place and Culture 7/2 (2000) pp. 143-161.
31. Rachel Silvey, 'Spaces of Protest; Gendered Migration, Social Networks, and Labor Protest in West Java, Indonesia', Political Geography 22/2 (2003) pp. 129-157.
32. Michael Burawoy, 'The Extended Case Method', Sociological Theory 16/1 (1998) pp. 4-33.
33. Graeme Hugo, 'Labour Export from Indonesia', ASEAN Economic Bulletin 12/2 (1995) pp. 275-298.
34. R. Adi, p. 131, as cited in E. Spaan, Labour Circulation and Socioeconomic Transformation: The Case of East Java, Indonesia (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 1999) p. 159.
35. Ibid., p. 158.
36. Department of Labor and Transmigration (Departemen Tenaga Kerja dan Transmigrasi, DEPNAKERTRANS), available at http://www.nakertrans.go.id/ pusdatinnaker/tki/index_tki.php, accessed 16 February 2006).
37. The government's estimates of remittance levels are undoubtedly far from accurate, but they provide a sense of the importance of the foreign exchange for the national economy. Actual income earned and contributed to families living in Indonesia probably far exceeds these estimates. But for the years 2001-2004, the total of the figures posted on the government's Manpower and Transmigration website was, in US dollars: 2,982,183,181 (http://www.nakertrans.go.id/pusdatinnaker/tki/ index_tki.php, accessed 20 July 2006).
38. Ernst Spaan, Labour Circulation and Socioeconomic Transformation: The Case of East Java, Indonesia (Groningen: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 1999).
39. Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995).
40. Spaan (note 33) pp. 131-132.
41. Ibid.
42. Rhacel Saazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001).
43. Michele Ruth Gamburd, The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000).
44. Wahyudi (note 1).
45. Ibid., p. 34.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., pp. 88-89.
49. Organised criminal activity, as well as informal corrupt practices directed at migrants are well documented by, among others, Sidney Jones, Making Money off Migrants: The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia (Hong Kong and Wollongon: Hong Kong Centre for Asia Pacific Transformation and University of Wollongon 2000)
50. Spaan (note 33)
51. Wahyudi (note 1)
52. Krisnawaty et al. (note 2).
53. Jones (note 44).