Labour recruitment, circuits of capital and gendered mobility: Reconceptualizing the indonesian migration industry

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 83, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 115-132

  Lindquist, Johan ^a  

^a STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITAL FLOW; ETHNICITY; GLOBALIZATION; INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION; LABOR MARKET; LABOR MIGRATION; LABOR MOBILITY; LABOR SUPPLY; MIGRANT WORKER; RECRUITMENT (EMPLOYMENT);

LESSER SUNDA ISLANDS; LOMBOK; SUNDA ISLES;

EID: 77950231671     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/2010831115     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. I would like to thank Daromir Rudnyckyj for his helpful reading and the two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging comments. Ongoing conversations with Rachel Silvey and Xiang Biao have been particularly important when writing this article. Thanks also to Apichai Shipper for inviting me to take part in this special issue and Hyung Gu Lynn and the staff at Pacific Affairs for their speed and focus. The research on which the article is based was funded by the Swedish Research Council and I am grateful for their generous support.
2. Raúl Hernández-Coss, Gillian Brown, Chitawati Buchori, Isaku Endo, Emiko Todoroki, Tita Naovalitha, Wameek Noor and Cynthia Mar, "The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor: Making Formal Transfers the Best Options for Women and Undocumented Migrants," World Bank Working Paper no. 149 (2008), p. 21.
3. See, for instance, Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
4. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005);
5. Dewi Anggraeni, Dreamseekers: Indonesian Women as Domestic Workers in Asia (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2006);
6. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (London: Granta Books, 2002);
7. Human Rights Watch, "Swept Under the Rug: Abuses against Domestic Workers Around the World," Human Rights Watch, vol. 18, no. 7 (C) (July 2006) pp. 1-93.
8. Douglas Massey, Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouci, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor, Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 190.
9. See, for instance, Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, "Conceptualizing International Labour Migration: A Structuration Perspective," International Migration Review, vol. 29, no. 2 (1995) pp. 317-351.
10. See, for instance, Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
11. Xiang Biao, "Transplanting Labour in East Asia," in Yamashita Shinji, Makito Minami, David Haines and Jeremy Edes, eds., Transnational Migration in East Asia: Japan in a Comparative Focus (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Ethnological Reports 77, 2008), p. 175.
12. See also Alan and Josephine Smart, who propose an alternative metaphor, "punctuation," in order to reconceptualize migrant flows and stoppages at the border to Hong Kong. "Time-Space Punctuation: Hong Kong's Border Regime and Limits on Mobility," Pacific Affairs, vol. 81, no. 2 (2008), pp. 175-193.
13. Xiang Biao, "Transnational and International Rupture: Compulsory Return as a Means of Migration Control in East Asia" (unpublished ms, n.d.).
14. Xiang Biao, "Transplanting Labour," p. 175.
15. Raúl Hernández-Coss et al., "The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor," p. 8.
16. Rachel Silvey, "Transnational Domestication: State Power and Indonesian Migrant Women in Saudi Arabia," Political Geography, vol. 23 (2004), pp. 245-264;
17. Michele Ford, "Beyond the Femina Fantasy: The Working-Class Woman in Indonesian Discourses of Women's Work," Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, vol. 37, no. 2 (2003), pp. 83-113.
18. Graeme Hugo, "Women's International Labour Migration," in Kathryn Robinson and Sharon Bessell, eds., Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), pp. 158-159.
19. Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion, p. 191;
20. Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, "Placing Movers: An Overview of the Asian-Pacific Migration System," The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 12, no. 12 (2000), p. 394;
21. Robyn Rodriguez, "The Labor Brokerage State and the Globalization of Filipina Care Workers," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, vol. 33 (2008), pp. 794-800.
22. Rachel Silvey, "Unequal Borders: Indonesian Transnational Migrants at Immigration Control," Geopolitics, vol. 12 (2007), p. 270.
23. Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian "Modernity" Project (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
24. Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
25. Rachel Silvey, "Transnational Domestication," p. 250;
26. Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, "Placing Movers," p. 394.
27. Most accounts claim that Indonesian men working on Malaysian construction sites and palm oil plantations during the 1990s were generally undocumented. See, for instance, Ida Bagoes Mantra, "Illegal Indonesian Labour Migration from Lombok to Malaysia," Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 40, no. 1 (1999), p. 64;
28. Graeme Hugo, "Women's International Labour Migration," p. 159.
29. Raúl Hernández-Coss et al., The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor, p. 57.
30. I was only able to access the data from 2000 until 2007. Even this data was considered sensitive by the officials in charge and I was only given the figures on a handwritten note. The reason for this unease is certainly that the government office that issues passports is widely known as a gudang uang, a "money warehouse."
31. RELA is an acronym for Ikatan Relawan Rakayat Malaysia, or Volunteers of the Malaysian People. See, for instance, Diana Wong, "The Rumor of Trafficking: Border Controls, Illegal Migration, and the Sovereignty of the Nation-State," in Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005);
32. Christine Chin, "'Diversification' and 'Privatisation': Securing Insecurities in the Receiving Country of Malaysia," Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 9, no. 4 (2008), pp. 285-303.
33. See the MOU "Regarding the Recruitment and Placement of Indonesian Domestic Workers," signed on 13 May 2006,
34. and the MOU "Regarding the Recruitment of Workers," which was signed on 10 May 2004.
35. Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion, p. 181.
36. Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, "Placing Movers," p. 386.
37. Xiang Biao, "Transnational and International Rupture."
38. Ernst Spaan, "Taikongs and Calos: The Role of Middlemen and Brokers in Javanese International Migration," International Migration Review, vol. 28, no. 1 (1994), pp. 93-113.
39. John MacDougall, "Criminality and the Political Economy of Security in Lombok, in Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken, eds., Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), p. 287.
40. Leena Avonius, "Reforming Wetu Telu: Islam, Adat, and the Promises of Regionalism in Post-New Order Lombok" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Leiden, 2004), ch. 2.
41. Raúl Hernández-Coss et al., 2008, The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor, p. xiii.
42. BP3TKI Mataram, "BP3TKI Dalam Angka" (Mataram, Lombok, Balai Pelayanan Penempatan dan Perlindungan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia, 2009).
43. Raúl Hernández-Coss et al., The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor, p. 9.
44. See Gavin Jones, Marriage and Divorce in Islamic South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994).
45. Sven Cederroth, The Spell of the Ancestors and the Power of Mekkah: A Sasak Community on Lombok (Gothenburg Studies in Social Anthropology, 1981), p. 167.
46. Leena Avonius, "Reforming Wetu Telu," p. 204.
47. Mary Judd, "The Sociology of Poverty in Rural Lombok, Indonesia" (Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1980), p. 151.
48. Harriot Beazley, "The Malaysian Orphans of Lombok: Children's Livelihood Responses to Out-Migration in Eastern Indonesia," in R. Panelli, R. Punch and E. Robson, eds., Young Rural Lives: Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth (London: Routledge, 2007).
49. Johan Lindquist, The Anxieties of Mobility: Development and Migration in the Indonesian Borderlands (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009).
50. Harriot Beazley, "The Malaysian Orphans of Lombok."
51. Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion, p. 153.
52. To open a recruitment company, proof of assets worth three billion rupiah, or $300,000 US, are required, one billion of which must be deposited into an account controlled by the Ministry of Manpower.
53. "Undang-Undang Republik Indonesia, nomor 39, 2004, Tentang Penempatan dan Perlindungan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia di Luar Negeri" (Law of the Republic of Indonesia number 39, 2004, Regarding the Departure and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers Abroad).
54. The aim of the migrant passport is to make the migration process less expensive. In fact, however, with the costs of corruption the two passports are comparable in price.
55. Petugas literally means "a subordinate who is given an order or task," while lapangan means "field." Although "field agent" is not an ideal translation, arguably it is preferable to "field operative" or "field worker," since the word "agent" highlights to a greater degree the form of brokering that the petugas lapangan engages in.
56. Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion, pp. 188-90;
57. Ernst Spaan, "Taikongs and Calos."
58. Ernst Spaan, "Taikongs and Calos."
59. Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 151-153;
60. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 9-10.
61. The Jakarta Post, 7 July 2009.
62. See, Rachel Silvey, "Unequal Borders," for an account of the migrant terminal in Jakarta. A smaller version, modeled on the one in Jakarta, opened on Lombok in 2009.
63. Daromir Rudnyckyj, "Technologies of Servitude: Governmentality and Indonesian Transnational Labor Migration," Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 3 (2004), pp. 407-434.
64. The work of feminist migration scholars such as Doreen Massey and, more recently in the context of Indonesia, Rachel Silvey, suggests that my study offers important material for considering relationships between gender, power and space-particularly in a transnational perspective. I hope to address these discussions more directly in forthcoming publications, but in this article I have chosen a different mode of analysis, which highlights the transformation of the contemporary migration industry rather than gender per se. See Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994),
65. Rachel Silvey, "Power, Difference and Mobility: Feminist Advances in Migration Studies," Progress in Human Geography, vol. 28, no. 4 (2004), pp. 490-506.