Contrasting Return Migrant Entrepreneurship Experiences in Javanese Villages
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12232 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| Author | Carol Chan,Ratih Pratiwi Anwar |
Contrasting Return Migrant Entrepreneurship
Experiences in Javanese Villages
Ratih Pratiwi Anwar* and Carol Chan**
INTRODUCTION
Migration-driven development programmes have increasingly been an important focus of interna-
tional development organizations, international financial and migration institutions, and govern-
ments of migrant destination and origin (Faist, 2008; Castles, 2009). Many of these programmes
grew out of discussions in international policy circles on how migration –and especially, migrant
entrepreneurship –can play an important role in addressing unemployment and poverty for
migrants, return migrants, and their countries of origin (IOM, 2013). For example, migrants are
encouraged to save or send remittances to start small and medium-sized enterprises at “home”,as
part of a larger aim to help develop their communities of origin (ibid; Hugo, 2009). While transna-
tional labour migration has indeed enabled migrants and their families to access higher levels of
income and better meet health, education, and consumption needs, policies and programmes that
emphasize the positive links between migration and development have been variously criticized.
First, international policy trends in representing migrants as “agents of development”
1
inadvertently
shift the responsibility of development from governments and institutions to migrants themselves
(Rodriguez, 2010). The majority of migration-development policies, which emphasize the role of
financial remittances, have also been criticized for downplaying social and human development in
favour of economic indicators (Piper, 2008; Schiller, 2012). For example, overly optimistic attitudes
towards migration-development agendas do not adequately consider how migrant remittances or
successful return migrant enterprises may potentially reproduce social and structural inequalities
(Delgado-Wise and Marquez-Covarrubias, 2011; de Haas, 2010).
We take these debates as a critical starting point for investigating contrasting experiences and
consequences of return migrant entrepreneurship in migrant-origin villages. This article is based
mainly on ethnographic fieldwork comparing two rural migrant-origin villages in the Province of
Yogyakarta Special Region, in Java, Indonesia. These sites provide an interesting comparative
study: in one site, return migrant enterprises have fostered an environment of fierce economic com-
petition, and accompanying social distrust, high levels of network exclusivity, and socio-economic
inequality. By contrast, in the second site, return migrants took numerous active steps toward
guarding the village against business monopolies and political elitism, through a system of fair-cli-
ent distribution and participatory decision-making. In this second site, return migrant entrepreneurs
appear to be promoting inclusive local economic growth, while also prioritizing the sensitive reso-
lution of social conflicts, which was deemed central to sustaining local businesses in the long term.
* University of Gadjah-Mada, Indonesia
** Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
doi: 10.1111/imig.12232
©2016 The Authors
International Migration ©2016 IOM
International Migration Vol. 54 (4) 2016
ISS N 00 20- 7985 Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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