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ABSTRACT
This article takes as its starting point the Indonesian government’s attempt to license informal brokers – field agents, or petugas lapangan – who recruit migrant workers that are sent to destinations across Asia and the Middle East. The licensing programme utilises biometric fingerprint technology in order to reinforce the boundaries of the Indonesian migration assemblage through the rearticulation of the category of the broker. The article argues that this programme and the attempt to license informal brokers through technology should be conceptualised not strictly in relation to the securitisation of migration, nor as a response to fragmentation in the wake of neoliberalisation, but more broadly in relation to concerns with regulating brokers that lead back to the Dutch colonial era.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Joshua Barker, Matthew Hull, Martijn Koster, Yves van Leynseele, Xiang Biao, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. A first draft was presented at a seminar at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore during my tenure as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The research for this article is based on ongoing and intermittent multi-sited field research in Indonesia since 2007. Although the bulk of the research has been on the island of Lombok, I have followed the brokers I have been studying to places across the country and abroad.
2 See Hugo (Citation2012: 399) on the increase in documented migration. There are no data on the drop in undocumented migration, but my ongoing fieldwork in migrant-sending areas, in tandem with Malaysian deportation programmes, point to a significant drop in undocumented migration (cf. Chin Citation2008), at least in the process of border-crossing. Once migrant workers are abroad many become undocumented either through absconding from their workplace or because they overstay their visas.
3 http://www.bnp2tki.go.id/uploads/data/data_07-08-2015_023536_Laporan_Pengolahan_Data_BNP2TKI_S.D_31_JULI_2015.pdf (Accessed 20 August 2015).
4 There are, however, ongoing high-level attempts to further ban the migration of women (http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/06/asia/indonesia-migrant-worker-ban/, Accessed 22 June 2015).
5 As Stoler (Citation1985: 25) has put it, ‘peasants remained village residents whose contact with the colonial apparatus was cushioned and muted by a layer of native civil servants’.
6 I am grateful to Joshua Barker for spelling out this point.
7 In contrast, the period from 1930s until the 1970s was a period of ‘disconnection’ (Amrith Citation2011: 89), as the Great Depression, World War II, and increasing migration regulations with the rise of the new nation-states, slowed migration considerably.
8 Dactyloscopy did, however, form the basis for the expansion of identification documents by way of health programmes and birth certificates (Barker Citation1999: 161–162, see also Strassler Citation2010: 130–131).
9 The number of recruitment companies is from unpublished data from BNP2TKI in Jakarta.
10 As of June 2013, 461 licensed agencies and 3227 branch offices were members of APJATI, the Indonesian Manpower Services Association. There is, however, a small number of competing organisations.