The end of migration (studies): Contemplating labour deployment in Indonesia’s development planning, and getting on with migration research

Abstract

In this article, I combine my observation of Indonesia’s desire to end labour outmigration with scholarly reflections on the end of migration studies. Challenging the orthodoxy that takes for granted sending countries’ support of migration as presumed in current optimism of the migration-development paradigm, I trace Indonesia’s successive development plans to demonstrate the treatment of migration as a less-preferred option for job creation, exploring how postcolonial trajectories entail the desire to keep development in situ and lead to persisting view of migration as deeply undesirable. The recent shift to governance works as a way to both discipline workers through required documentation and to allow the government to eschew accountability by advancing a discourse on protection. As the state sets out a future anticipation where those defined as unskilled no longer migrate, a question arises as to how we build a meaningful scholarship around migration as a non-priority and the process towards making a certain migrant category disappear? My critique of development planning turns the analytical lens back to the state, which I see as a way to go on with the study of migration in a more ethical, pro-migrant manner. Rejecting the trap of methodological nationalism, I offer an approach that seizes of the ‘postcolonial moment’ of migration.