View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sydney eScholarship Where Internal and International Migration Intersect: Mobility and the Formation of Multi-Ethnic Communities in the Riau Islands Transit Zone LENORE LYONS AND MICHELE FORD University of Wollongong and University of Sydney While migration studies scholars have paid considerable attention to internal migration within Indonesia, as well as to international labour migration flows from Indonesia, they have rarely considered the intersections between these two processes. This paper addresses the gap through a close analysis of migration flows in one of Indonesia’s key transit areas – the Riau Islands. We argue that in the borderlands the processes of internal and international migration are mutually constitutive. The Riau Islands’ status as a transit zone for international labour migrants and as a destination for internal migrants determines its demographic profile and policies of migration control. Bordering practices are strongly influenced by the fact that not everyone who comes to the Riau Islands has the intention of moving on, and not all international migrants returning to the islands intend to go home. Our analysis demonstrates that internal migration cannot be understood as a solely national phenomenon, and that international migration cannot only be explained by push and pull factors in sending and receiving destinations. These complexities necessitate research and policy responses that take into account the unique character of the transit provinces, and the role that their geographical location plays in the formation of multi-ethnic communities and the management of migration. ndonesia is the focus of considerable attention within contemporary migration I studies. Migration scholars have documented in detail the dual processes of internal migration (both state-sponsored transmigration as well as “spontaneous” internal migration) within Indonesia as well as international labour migration flows from Indonesia. Internal migration, especially through the transmigration programme, has changed the economic, environmental and ethnic landscapes of many regions in Indonesia’s outer islands (Dawson 1999; Elmhirst 2000; Fearnside 1997; Tirtosudarmo 1990). Meanwhile, the placement of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians overseas every year has reshaped communities not only in migrant International Journal on Multicultural Societies (IJMS), Vol. 9, No. 2, 2007: 236-263 ISSN 1817-4574, www.unesco.org/shs/ijms/vol9/issue2/art7 © UNESCO Where Internal and International Migration Intersect 237 workers’ provinces of origin, but in the borderland communities through which many of them pass on their way to and from overseas. In 2006, almost 650,000 Indonesians were placed through formal international labour migration programmes (Depnakertrans 2007a, 2007b). Many hundreds of thousands more leave through unofficial channels. It has been suggested that in the 1990s, migration from Indonesia to Malaysia through official channels was only one-third of that through alternative channels (Nayyar 1997). It is perhaps surprising, then, that the literatures on these two kinds of migration seldom intersect. Instead, internal migration and international migration are dealt with as separate phenomena and the links between them are rarely considered. The extensive body of work on international labour migration from Indonesia has focused on national-level policies or on labour migrants’ experiences in their provinces of origin, during the process of migration, or in the destination country (cf. Hugo 2002; Sukamdi and Brownlee 2000).1 The ongoing preoccupation among researchers and activists with the regulatory frameworks and socio-cultural conditions in receiving countries and how these shape migrant workers’ experiences of labour migration (cf. Huang et al. 2005; Loveband 2004) was sparked by several high profile cases of physical and sexual abuse, and deaths of migrant workers, many of them women working as domestic helpers in Asia and the Middle East (HRW 2004; Quinn 2002). Other accounts deal in depth with the individual experiences of migrant workers themselves (cf. Abdul Rahman 2003; von der Borch 2006; Wong and Anwar 2003). With a few exceptions (Tirtosudarmo 2004; Ford 2001, 2006), the literature has said very little about the impact of migration flows on the transit provinces through which many of them pass. The lack of scholarly interest in Indonesia’s transit provinces in part reflects the highly centralised approach taken by the national government during the Suharto years (1966–98), when policy-makers paid little attention to the documented flows of migrant workers through Sumatra and Kalimantan and refused to recognise the large flows of undocumented labour migrants across land and sea borders. The centralised approach to labour migration policy continued until 2002, when Malaysia stepped up forced repatriation of undocumented labour migrants causing a humanitarian crisis in the East Kalimantan border zone centred around Nunukan (Ford 2006). Although since then more attention has been paid to structures and processes for managing returned labour migrants in the transit zones, there has been little examination of the broader socio-economic impacts of migration on the transit zone community themselves. This paper seeks to address this lacuna through a close analysis of migration flows in one of Indonesia’s key transit areas – the Riau Islands (Provinsi Kepulauan Riau, Kepri Province).2 The territory of Kepri Province consists of the main islands 1 For an overview of this literature see Ford (2006). 2 The research on which this paper is based was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant In the Shadow of Singapore: The Limits of Transnationalism in Insular 238 Lenore Lyons and Michele Ford of Bintan, Batam, Karimun (collectively known as the Riau Islands), along with Natuna and Lingga, as well as many other smaller islands and islets. The province was officially formed in 2002. Before that time, the islands – which lie in the Straits of Malacca to the north-east of Sumatra and directly south of Singapore – were incorporated into the Province of Riau, whose capital is located in Pekanbaru on the Sumatran Mainland. Like other borderland regions situated close to much wealthier economies, the Riau Islands have experienced rapid social and economic transformation by virtue of their proximity to Malaysia and Singapore. They are the site of considerable documented and undocumented labour flows to both countries, as well as the nearest point for repatriation of workers whose contracts have ended or undocumented migrants who have been deported. The islands have also attracted large numbers of internal transmigrants in search of work. This has particularly been the case since the formation of the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT) in 1990, a project that heralded a new era of cross- border economic engagement, promising to restore Riau Islanders’ dreams of prosperity by leveraging Singapore’s status as an “Asian Tiger” to improve economic conditions in the islands, and by allowing the islanders special access to Singapore and Malaysia. We examine a range of geographical sites in Kepri Province in order to tease out the relationship between different forms of migration and various attempts to manage them. As Batam has been the main focus of the growth triangle initiative, it figures prominently in economic studies of the Riau Islands.3 As a result, the realities of different island communities are often lost: the experiences of other islanders are either ignored or aggregated with those of Batam Islanders. In order to understand the differential impact that internal and international migration has had on different parts of the province it is important to consider more than one geographical location. In this paper, we focus on two internal sites (Batam and Bintan islands) and two geopolitical border sites (the Indonesia-Singapore and the Indonesia-Malaysia borders) and trace the migration flows across and within these sites over a thirty-year period. We have chosen the island of Bintan for two reasons. First, it is the site of the current provincial capital, Tanjung Pinang (also an important pre-colonial and colonial seat of power); and second, it has been the focus of a number of significant development projects under the IMS-GT. Our research is the first attempt to bring together existing (and sometimes piecemeal) demographic and qualitative data with an analysis of the regulatory frameworks designed to control population movements within and through the province. Our analysis begins with an overview of population movements into and out of the islands. This section documents the socio-economic forces that have contributed to the movement of large numbers of Indonesians into the transit area. We examine Riau (DP0557368) – see project website http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/intheshadow/. The ethnographic material draws on research interviews conducted with Riau Islanders and Singaporeans during 2004–07. 3 In contrast, anthropological studies, with the exception of Lindquist (2004), focus on the island of Bintan (Wee 1985, 2002; Faucher 2006, 2002), or study the sea nomads of the region (Chou 2006; Chou and Wee 2002). Where Internal and International Migration Intersect 239 the impact that these movements have had on population sizes as well as the changing gender and ethnic composition of