Confined Mobilities: Following Indonesian Migrant Workers on Their Way Home

Abstract

This paper examines the return journeys of Indonesian migrant domestic workers to their home towns. When migrant workers return home, the Indonesian government sets them apart from other travellers in order to protect the migrants from extortion in the airport environment, and assist them during their return to their home villages. We investigate how this separate passage results in a mobility regime that produces differences between regular travellers and migrant worker travellers, and between male and female migrant workers. We also examine how the mobility regime results in particular forms of control over and safety of migrant workers' mobility. In doing so, we argue that the politics of mobility not only can be studied at the scale of global circuits, or at nodes such as the workplace, but also in relation to the actual journeys that migrant workers make.

Gendered Morality and Development Narratives: The Case of Female Labor Migration from Indonesia

“…On the flipside, discourses of "protection" of migrant women reinforce perceptions of all women as potential victims [52,57], since these discourses seldom refer to male migration. It is important to note that migrant and labor activists, workers, and their families contribute to and critique these moral evaluations and expectations in diverse ways [52,59], and that these gendered moral evaluations operate similarly in other migrant-origin countries in Southeast Asia.…”

“…The gender-specific exploitation and abuses confronting Indonesia's migrant domestic worker population have been widely documented [6,7,23,32,51,52,57,81,82,[85][86][87][88][89][90]. While experiences of migration are variously dependent on chance, luck and a migrant's confidence, personality and skills, many of these women usually risk or are trapped in forms of debt bondage to informal recruiters, recruitment agencies or employers; face physical, verbal or psychological violence by employers; have unregulated work hours and conditions and share their employers' residences.…”

“…This approach risks reinforcing the idea of the vulnerable migrant-who is often female-who needs to be protected by the state [55,56]. Scholars who analyze narratives of victimhood in human trafficking reports and campaigns have highlighted how such narratives may instead support and complement policies which perpetuate social and economic inequalities behind migrants' vulnerabilities, by focusing on individuals who are responsible for harm or evil, as opposed to more redistributive approaches to justice [33,56,57]. At stake in these discussions is how the vulnerability, risk, and responsibility of particular migrants are conceived by state authorities, activists, and academics.…”

“…Indeed, while the state frequently frames migrants as "heroes of development" in bringing in billions of US dollars' worth of remittances annually, they also systematically devalue domestic work, forms of practical skills and labor associated with rural populations' lack of formal education, and migrants' safety [101,102]. In another representative speech, an un-named state official explains that migrants' lack of "skills" and "under-education" render them "more prone to exploitation and torture by unscrupulous employers and agencies" [6][7][8][9][10]57,71,103]. While this may be true to some extent, the National Agency's discursive and programmatic focus on migrants self-responsibility also explain labor abuse in terms of migrants' own uniquely class-based failings.…”

“…A common observation made by scholars on female migration in South-East Asia and elsewhere is that women encounter a broader range of social and bureaucratic negotiations, and higher moral expectations for their migratory success and return, as compared to their male peers [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][23][24][25][26][27][28][32][33][34][35][36][37]51,52,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. Following these scholars, this article highlights the ways that representations of Indonesian migrants as heroes of development, or exploited victims, commonly share local culturally and religiously inflected assumptions about gender and morality.…”