Memo #78
(The second Memo from the Theme, Labour Migration from Southeast Asia)
Johan Lindquist – johan.lindquist [at] socant.su.se
Are brokers crucial to international migration in Asia? Yes, based on the results of a recent workshop at the National University of Singapore. Brokers’ importance is increasing due to new bilateral agreements and market deregulation. But a full analysis of Asian migration also depends on understanding the social relationship between brokers and migrants, and the way migrants come to trust an emerging class of informal brokers.
Take the case of Indonesia. Since the fall of President Suharto in 1998, Indonesia has witnessed remarkable growth of licensed migration brokers. Post-Suharto reforms included market deregulation, which opened the way for these agencies to recruit migrant labour. At the same time, reforms that strengthened government regulations increased demand for brokers to handle migrants’ documentation. In addition, the collapse of the Indonesian rupiah during the 1997 Asian crisis created economic incentives for international migration. By 2007, 700,000 Indonesians officially travelled abroad as migrants, primarily to Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Men tend to work in the construction and palm oil industries and women as domestic servants.
Today, there are around 500 licensed agencies, most with multiple branches that recruit and transport migrants to employers abroad. These agencies depend on large numbers of informal brokers, petugas lapangan, or “field agents,” who handle the actual recruitment of migrants in villages throughout Indonesia. Migration occurs via a complicated and fragmented network of licensed and informal brokers who thrive on the regulations created to control them.
Both licensed and informal brokers are widely vilified. Internationally, there is concern with human trafficking and abuses within the documented migration industry. In Indonesia, informal brokers are blamed for obscuring information and extracting excessive fees from migrants.
But this assessment is often unfair. Many informal brokers are local authority figures. With the rise of documented migration, the elementary school teacher – who works short hours, is well-known, widely respected, and used to dealing with paperwork – has replaced the stereotypical thug as the ideal informal broker.
At the heart of the relationship between the informal broker and the migrant is the
question of trust. Understanding how villagers become migrants, and how the
current regime of international migration is organized, must begin with this relationship of trust. One shouldn’t simply blame brokers or aim to improve flows of information to migrants. This shift of focus onto relationships between brokers and migrants highlights structural problems in the migration process – rather than blaming particular actors – and thus bring more accuracy and complexity to ongoing ethical debates.
About the Author:
Johan Lindquist – Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University.
Links:
- Lindquist, Johan. Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry, Pacific Affairs, Volume 83, No. 1, March 2010
- Migrants for Export: How the Philipinne State Brokers Labor to the World, 2010 (Book on brokers)
- Opening the Black Box of Migration: Brokers and the Organization of Transnational Mobility, August 2010 (Workshop at National University of Singapore)
Related Memos:
- Other Memos about Labour issues
- Other Memos about Indonesia and Southeast Asia