Building the Channels, Keeping the Gates: The Role of Intermediaries in Shaping Differentiated Transnational Labor Mobilities out of Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the largest labor sending countries in Asia. While Indonesian workers are seen in many different countries and different occupations, there are salient regional patterns of labor migration: Domestic workers often come from East and Central Java; Workers bound for Malaysia primarily hail from North Sumatra and West Nusa Tenggara. Moreover, while workers from North Sumatra are more likely to work in factories, those from West Nusa Tenggara mostly work in palm oil plantations. Women from Lombok, on the other hand, often work as domestic workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan instead of Malaysia. Meanwhile, some regions’ outbound labor mobilities are more diverse and the destinations have also changed over the time, such as West Java. How can we understand such regional patterns and changes? Sociologists explain the mechanisms for shaping transnational migration trajectories and patterns by emphasizing accumulative causation, especially the effects of social networks (Massey 1993). Recently, researchers have introduced more feedback mechanisms in the explanation of migration corridors, bringing in influences of social media as well as the changing economic conditions in sending and receiving countries (Bakewell et al. 2016). This literature misses the role of intermediaries. This paper investigates the shaping mechanisms of such transnational labor mobility patterns from the vantage point of the intermediaries. Using national labor mobility data as well as interviews with sending companies in different regions of Indonesia between 2022 and 2024, this paper shows how the intersection of ethnicity, religion, gender and class create historical patterns of regional inequality in Indonesia, and such inequality has shaped regional patterns of migration and sustained and reproduced by intermediaries.