South Eastern Asia · data through 2024
Indonesia sends a large number of workers abroad, especially domestic and plantation workers to Malaysia and the Gulf, with strong female participation.
Twenty five year view
These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.
Why people move
Movement is concentrated in specific provinces and organised through both official channels and informal brokers. Protection of domestic workers has been a central policy question for two decades.
Connections
Common destinations
Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, United Arab Emirates
Common origins
Malaysia, China, Timor Leste
Adapting and finding support
Domestic work inside private homes is the hardest sector to inspect and the easiest place for abuse to hide. Returning workers need financial guidance to keep what they earned.
Go through the official placement agency system and keep contract copies before departure.
Use the support guideResearch that explains this pattern
Behavioural economics
Living with too little money, time, or certainty consumes attention itself, leaving less capacity for planning and paperwork.
Missed appointments and delayed applications are effects of hardship rather than proof of carelessness.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, 2013
Anthropology
Sending money home is not only economic. It maintains standing, honours obligation, and keeps a person a member of the family they left.
People send money they cannot spare, and stopping carries social cost heavier than the financial one.
Marcel Mauss on the gift, applied in contemporary migration ethnography
Psychology
Repeated discrimination, vigilance, and the expectation of rejection accumulate into a chronic health burden.
Health outcomes worsen with time in a hostile setting, even as income and language improve.
Ilan Meyer, minority stress model, extended to immigrant populations
Support inside and beyond Indonesia
Official placement, protection, and complaint handling for workers abroad.
Indonesian workers overseas
OpenAssistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.
Anyone moving, arriving, or returning
OpenFamily tracing, first aid, food, shelter, and restoring family links.
People in transit and newly arrived families
OpenThese are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.
Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.