Passport Entanglements

Modern-day securitization forces former colonies into navigating passport documentation, producing gendered and precarious migration rather than protection. Constable starts Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations with a challenge: to question the new technology and biometrics in passports reinforcing inequality in migration infrastructure. She uses the case of Indonesian domestic migrant workers in Hong Kong to show how colonial power, the state(s), and the private sector are all tied together.Although this book systematically produces simple binary themes in every chapter, the key points of these chapters link to the broader continuum of Indonesia's female migrant labor passport project analysis: the context, the methodology, female migrant workers’ aspirations, experts’ standpoints, and the social reproduction perspective on passport and bureaucratization in Indonesia today.In chapter 1, this book offers the narrative story of Indonesian female domestic workers about how they got a real but fake (asli tapi palsu) passport to go to Hong Kong. Fake documents are common among migrant workers and officers because they legalize those who are below-legal age or change other personal details of Indonesian migrant workers. They also maintain the business of local subrecruiters or recruitment agencies in the whole migration business, involving states and nonstate actors. She uses the term “biopolitics” (9) to refer to the administration and regulation of the population through passports using iris scanning technology, fingerprinting, and biometric measurement, symbolizing gendered and racialized labor migration rather than good governance.In chapter 2, Constable discusses how to navigate her positionality as a foreign researcher interacting with domestic workers, activists, advocates, and Indonesian officials as a methodological reflexivity. With the ethnographic story of Indonesian female domestic workers in Hong Kong, this academic work scrutinizes the author's discussion as an information broker as a foreign researcher (47), which could highlight her data production.Chapter 3 traces the mundane matter of domestic migrant workers emerging from the binary between care and control. She attempts to analyze how private, caring, and serving as emotional labor are concomitant to the power or control of employers, brokers, migratory policy, and global capitalism. While domestic workers navigate the process of migration abroad through intermediaries and the practice of care work, this analysis successfully narrates the high level of interconnectedness between care facilitating protection by migratory infrastructure and control, revealing repression by migratory surveillance both in home and host country (85).Chapter 4 depicts migrant protection and control that are rooted in the use of real but fake domestic workers’ passports. Despite the strict border control and international migration arrangements, “aspal” passports were not an issue in Hong Kong until the Indonesian government released a new biometric identification system named SIMKIM (Sistem Informasi Manajemen Keimigrasian [Immigration Information Management System]). This new technology detected duplication of identity and data inconsistency, which positioned domestic migrant workers as criminals for immigration fraud (118), where the passports were produced by agencies and bribed officials. Because there were two opposite pathways but they were entangled in migrant documentation, this situation revealed the conflict of interest between actors responding to the old and new systems of the national identity database, which places migrant workers in a more disadvantageous situation.Chapter 5 addresses Indonesian passport history, unpacking the relationship between government officials, the migration industry, and society, while chapter 6 describes Indonesia as a sovereign nation trying to navigate migration issues and passport documentation. Constable presents the historical background of the passport story from Dutch colonial rule and how it is reproduced in the migrant recruitment practices of the Indonesian government today (147–51). Then Constable contextualizes it within contemporary migrant transnational activities, allowing her to explore migrants’ agency and collective action under political and activist dimensions at the grassroots level (169). The last chapter strengthens the practice of passport projects that could be reproduced through generations in a particular time and space following power, meaning, and legitimacy. With the logic of interweaving threats of analysis that connects one chapter to another, this scholarly work brilliantly traces the entanglement of various actors in both formal and informal networks in multiple time frames and impressively captures micro and macro scales of renewal passport project practices.While this book's analysis scrutinizes the microinteractions and processes of assertiveness of domestic migrants as passport victims relating to their educational background (112), it raises the question of how their agency was acquired. Referring to learning process accumulation through her personal network, migrant activism, and union background, this explanation can identify how migrant organizations and unions might facilitate migrant assertiveness in facing injustice and precarious working conditions in the global migration industry.Whereas Constable supports reproducing Indonesian migrant “fly by nights” mobility, resonating in a similar pattern of “the sale of labor” between Dutch colonial rule (149–51), it might be clarified by comparing how the current Indonesia mobility today is now equipped with Indonesian law on Elimination of Human Trafficking Crimes (Law No. 21/2007). Since this analysis also produces themes about challengeable reproduction, considering the power relations of state, migrant activists, and their activism (169), which means social reproduction might not yield similar patterns, it leaves open the possibility that Dutch colonization might not be the only force behind the practice of Indonesia labor migration arrangement today. The current practices of Indonesian migration might be contextually reproduced, depending on the emerging actors in civil society organizations that actively monitor their reflexivity toward global migration, and might shape social practices that would have been more apparent in their agency and the migrant's articulation than Indonesian migrant mobility in the Dutch colonial epoch.Beyond these minor concerns, this book has several meritorious contributions to the literature on Asia global care migration, including a robust feminist standpoint methodology, extensive data production, and development of the theory of entanglement in critical migration issues. In addition, this book offers academics studying contemporary migrant labor a lucid ethnographer's valuable piece of writing while maintaining readability for nonspecialists. Practically, this perspective can be rudimentary for labor recruitment practices and surveillance technology in the Indonesian migration system. In fact, analyzing the disentanglement of passport and migration context seems like a utopian project across larger scales of space, time, politics, economy, society, and the individual

Geography · Political science · China's Global Influence and Migration · History · Migration and Labor Dynamics