The elementary school teacher, the Thug and his grandmother: Informal brokers and transnational migration from Indonesia

Pacific Affairs

Volumn 85, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 69-89

  Lindquist, Johan ^a  

^a STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

Brokers; Indonesia; Labour recruitment; Malaysia; Migration; Saudi Arabia

Indexed keywords

BUREAUCRACY; CENTRALIZATION; ECONOMIC INSTABILITY; INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION; LABOR MIGRATION; RECRUITMENT (EMPLOYMENT);

INDONESIA; MALAYSIA; SAUDI ARABIA;

EID: 84930480516     PISSN: 0030851X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5509/201285169     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. This article is a continuation of a previous publication that dealt with private recruitment agencies: "Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry," Pacific Affairs 83, no. 1 (2010): 115-132. Thanks to comments from participants in the workshop, "Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers and the Organization of Transnational Mobility," at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 19-20 August 2010, in which I presented a first version of this essay. Thanks also to Hyung Gu Lynn and the staff at Pacific Affairs for their support, and to Staffan Löfving and the three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
2. During one longer and three shorter visits between 2007 and 2010 I have conducted nearly six months of fieldwork on Lombok. Most of this research has focused explicitly on recruitment agencies and informal brokers, rather than migrants. In this process, I have spent most of my time interviewing and observing everyday life in recruitment agencies and government offices, and driving around the island to visit informal brokers. I expect that the project will be developed in comparative terms, as I hope to begin fieldwork in the largely Christian parts of Flores-located east of Lombok-in 2012.
3. Although the World Bank states in a recent report that migrant flows to Malaysia are primarily undocumented
4. 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), 57). my field research suggests that in recent years there has been a drop in undocumented and a rise in documented migration from Indonesia to Malaysia, particularly in the context of the exclusively male palm oil and construction industries. On Lombok, this shift has been particularly obvious. During field work it was nearly impossible to find brokers or migrants who were interested in sending or being sent to Malaysia without a passport. For further examples from West Java.
5. Olivia Killias, "'Illegal' Migration as Resistance: Legality, Morality and Coercion in Indonesian Domestic Worker Migration to Malaysia," Asian Journal of Social Science 38, no. 6 (2010): 897-914.
6. Christine Chin, "'Diversification' and 'Privatisation': Securing Insecurities in the Receiving Country of Malaysia," Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology vol. 9, no. 4 (2008): 285-303.
7. For a historical perspective on Java.
8. Ernst Spaan, "Taikongs and Calos: The Role of Middlemen and Brokers in Javanese International Migration," International Migration Review 28, no. 1 (1994): 93-113.
9. On the tai kong, see Sidney Jones, Making Money off Migrants: The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia (Hong Kong: Asia 2000 Ltd, 2000).
10. Hernández-Coss et al., "The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor," 8.
11. Nazeer, Zubaidah and Elizabeth Looi, "Muddle Over Maids: A Malaysian-Indonesia Dispute Over the Treatment of Maids is Hurting Both Sides," The Straits Times (Singapore), January 28, 2011.
12. Rachel Silvey, "Unequal Borders: Indonesian Transnational Migrants at Immigration Control," Geopolitics 12 (2007): 265-279. For a study that highlights the common effects of regulation and protection.
13. Daromir Rudnyckj, "Technologies of Servitude: Governmentality and Indonesian Transnational Labor Migration," Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 407-434.
14. For a similar process, see Xiang's article in this issue.
15. This can be compared to the nearly 1500 agencies registered in the Philippines in 2006.
16. Anna Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, Manfacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 90. In the last decade there has been a steady rise of agencies in the Philippines. For instance, the number of agencies delivering migrants to the United Arab Emirates has more than doubled during this period.
17. Dovelyn Rannveig Agunias, "Migration's Middlemen: Regulating Recruitment Agencies in the Philippines-United Arab Emirates Corridor" (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2010).
18. Robert Harney, "The Padrone and the Immigrant," Canadian Review of American Studies 5, no. 2 (1974), 110.
19. Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrants in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18.
20. Robyn Rodriquez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
21. Guevarra, Marketing Dreams
22. Rodriguez (2010) argues that the Philippines should be conceptualized as a labour brokerage state that is explicitly neoliberal.
23. Rodriguez, Migrants for Export, xxi-xxii.
24. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, "Neoliberalizing Space," Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002), 380-404.
25. The often-repeated call for studying "actually existing neoliberalisms" suggests as much (see Peck and Tickell, "Neoliberalizing Space," 383, for an early statement), but arguably the call has been repeated more often than actually generating a convincing response.
26. Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (Chichester: John Wiley, 1979), 4.
27. Clifford Geertz, "The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural Broker," Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 2 (1960), 228-249.
28. Adam McKeown's article in this issue, and his Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
29. John MacDougall, "Criminality and the Political Economy of Security in Lombok," in Hen Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken, eds., Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 287.
30. Hernández-Coss et al., "The Malaysia-Indonesia Remittance Corridor," xiii.
31. BP3TKI Mataram, "BP3TKI Dalam Angka" (Mataram, Lombok, Balai Pelayanan Penempatan dan Perlindungan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia, 2009).
32. Leena Avonius, "Reforming Watu Telu: Islam, Adat, and the Promises of Regionalism in Post-New Order Lombok" (PhD thesis, University of Leiden, 2004).
33. On familiarity and trust. Luhmann, Trust and Power, 33.
34. Niklas Luhmann, Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives, in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta, electronic edition, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, 2000, chapter 6, 94-107, http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/lumann94-107.pdf, accessed on October 1, 2011.
35. This is in contrast to Malaysia and Singapore, where around six months salary can be deducted for fees. On the differences between these migrations systems.
36. Jon Goss and Bruce Lindquist, "Placing Movers: An Overview of the Asian-Pacific Migration System," The Contemporary Pacific 12, no. 12 (2000): 385-414. The claims about Chinese interests in migration to Saudi Arabia were made in three separate interviews with managers of private recruitment agencies in Jakarta during August 2010.
37. Most prospective migrants-and indeed most rural inhabitants on Lombok-lack even a birth certificate.
38. Lindquist, "Labour Recruitment."
39. Debt can also be reclaimed through the services of paramilitary groups, pamswakarsa, which generally charge 30 percent of the sum returned. From what I can tell, this is primarily used in relationships between agencies and PL, or between PL, rather than in relationships with migrants, who tend to avoid debt through flight.
40. Lindquist, "Labour Recruitment."
41. Wayne Palmer, "Costly Inducements," Inside Indonesia, no. 100 (2010), http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-100/costly-inducements-24041289, accessed August 15, 2010.
42. McKeown, this issue.
43. As Boissevain puts it, through Haji Said's control of primary resources, land, capital and people, he has transformed himself from a broker into a patron.
44. Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Basil Blackwell, 1974), 147-148.
45. Chee, Yeoh, and Vu's article in this issue for a similar discussion of the importance of social position in commercial matchmaking among Malaysian men and Vietnamese migrant women.
46. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order, as well as his article in this issue, and Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor, who have both made this point in their historical studies.
47. It is important to compare migrant brokers to the forms of patron-client relationships, which have historically characterized Lombok. As in the 1970s, today the rural poor have only their unskilled labour to sell. Patrons of that era and migrant brokers of the contemporary era both brokered labour, the former through direct hire or exchange, the latter through particular forms of expertise and mediation. Much more could, of course, be written about this.
48. Mary Judd, "The Sociology of Rural Poverty in Lombok, Indonesia" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1980).
49. Rita Afsar, "Unravelling the Vicious Cycle of Recruitment: Labour Migration from Bangladesh to the Gulf States," (Working Paper 63, Geneva: International Labour Office, 2009), 18-19. It is striking to compare with recent studies of the Philippines.
50. Rodriguez, Migrants for Export.
51. Guevarra, Marketing Dreams, in which the informal broker is hardly mentioned. One important difference, however, is that while these authors focus on skilled nurses, this article is concerned with unskilled migrants.
52. Agunias, "Migration's Middlemen," 8, for a short note on how migrants in rural areas in the Philippines are often approached by brokers.
53. Philip Martin, "Merchants of Labor: Labor Recruiters in Asia," paper presented at the workshop, "Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers and the Organization of Transnational Mobility," Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, August 19-20, 2010.
54. Theodore Bestor, "Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City," American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 76-95.
55. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990).
56. This is something that Geertz argued would happen in more general terms in the shift from the bazaar-type to the firm-type economy in East Java in the years before the fall of Sukarno.
57. Clifford Geertz, Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
58. Deborah James, "The Return of the Broker: Consensus, Hierarchy, and Choice in South African land reform," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, no. 2 (2011): 318-338.
59. On the Foucaultian understanding of "governing at a distance" in the context of labour brokerage.
60. Anna Guevarra, Marketing Dreams.