The Elementary School Teacher, the Thug, and his Grandmother: Informal Brokers and Transnational Migration from Indonesia

This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasingly deregulated market for migrant recruitment. These agencies, in turn, depend on informal brokers who recruit migrants in villages across Indonesia to work on palm oil plantations and as domestic servants in countries such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. This article takes these informal brokers as a starting point for considering the current Indonesian migration regime, using ethnographic data from the island of Lombok. Along with offering a description of brokering practices, the article argues that the the dual process of centralization of migration control and fragmentation of labour recruitment has created a space of mediation for individuals who can navigate bureaucratic process while embodying the ethical qualities that convince Indonesian villagers to become migrants.

小學教師、惡棍和他的祖母：非正式中介者和印度尼西亞的跨國移民

本文考查在印度尼西亞日益正式化的跨國勞工移民體製下出現的非正式中介者。自1997年亞洲經濟危機和蘇哈托政權倒臺之後，流向馬來西亞的有記錄的跨國移民急劇增加，但同時也存在大量的沒有記錄的移民。在這一過程中，一批數量日益增加的私營機構控制了管制逐漸解除的移民招募市場。而這些機構又依賴於非正式中介者在印度尼西亞的農村招募移民去棕櫚油種植園工作或到馬來西亞和沙特阿拉伯等國家做傭人。本文使用從龍目島收集的民族志研究數據，以這些非正式中介者為出發點攷察當前印度尼西亞的移民體製。通過對中介實踐的描述，本文提出，移民控制中央化和移民招募分散化的雙重過程為那些能夠游走於官僚程序之中同時具有能說服印度尼西亞村民成為移民的道德品質的個人製造了一個得以斡旋其間的空間。

Translated from English by Xin Huang