Circular Migration in Indonesia

Abstract

not only to the widespread incidence, but also to the social and economic significance of circulation, seasonal migration, and commuting within Indonesia. The bulk of this mobility, however, goes unrecorded in large-scale demographic surveys and censuses, which routinely adopt the familiar criteria and questions designed to detect predominantly longer distance, more-or-less permanent changes in usual place of residence. The low levels of the latter type of movement revealed by these censuses and surveys appear to confirm the conventional stereotyping of most Indonesians (and in particular the inhabitants of Java) as immobile peasants who are born, live, and die in the same house, scarcely traveling beyond the confines of their natal village. Although the interprovincial, more-or-less permanent migration detected by the census is but one subset of total population mobility in Indonesia, in the absence of more comprehensive national (or even regional) level statistics census-defined migration and population mobility have become synonymous in the literature.1 This paper reviews the findings of a number of intensive studies carried out in several parts of Indonesia to establish whether nonpermanent population mobility is a phenomenon of social, economic, and demographic significance in Indonesia. Evidence from a large number of surveys demonstrates the widespread occurrence of temporary forms of population mobility in Indonesia and the many forms that mobility takes. The major explanations that have been put forward to explain this mobility are then summarized. Accelerating levels of temporary population mobility have both short- and long-term implications for achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth within Indonesia. A number of these issues are raised in the concluding section of this paper. Several directions in continuing research into nonpermanent mobility are identified in which demographers could make a significant contribution to the understanding of fundamental changes taking place within Indonesian society.