Stateless children, parents & undocumented migration: An Indonesian case study

In 2017, CAPI Visiting Scholar Leslie Butt (UVic Department of Anthropology) and Jessica Ball (UVic Child and Youth Care) completed the writing up and publication of results from a SSHRC Insight Development Grant obtained in 2014 on undocumented migrant families and birth registration. The project, entitled Stateless Children, Parents, and Undocumented Migration: An Indonesian Case Study, involved field research in East Lombok in four separate rural communities with high levels of out-migration. Butt, Ball and collaborator Harriot Beazley (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia) spent a total of 12 weeks in Jakarta and in East Lombok in 2014-2016.

Children of migrants tend to live in highly fragmented families, with little infrastructural support, and in precarious economic conditions. Typically, parents and children are not registered at birth and lack formal identity documents. This is not unusual: one third to one half of all children in the world lack birth registration. The research team investigated how transnational migrant families in Indonesia think about and make decisions around whether to seek birth registration for children who stay behind while parents engage in migration. The research team spent time in four rural villages in East Lombok, Indonesia where they conducted focus groups, interviews with stakeholders, and interviews with members of more than 40 families, in order to hear their perspectives on birth registration.

The study found links between an engrained pattern of labour migration, low birth registration, and difficulty accessing registration services. Many families shared stories of extreme poverty, exploitative work conditions for migrating parents, and difficulties making sure their children’s needs were met while they were away at work. The study also found very low birth registration rates of just 12% of respondents. The findings demonstrate the value of listening to families, and of exploring fully their views on multiple barriers to birth registration. Families need policies to recognize accessibility issues for mobile populations, and to offer effective support with childrearing as a means to counteract the potential long-term debilitating effects of statelessness in transnational migrant families.

The team is committed to spreading their research results among stakeholders and research participants. In 2016, Drs. Ball and Beazley traveled to Jakarta and Lombok to meet with various groups to discuss research results and set in motion next steps in research and activism around the issue of birth registration for migrant families.

In 2016, Dr. Jessica Ball received the UVic Provost’s Engaged Scholar Award for community-engaged scholarship achievements and service over three decades, including the Indonesia project which involved a partnership with Mataram University and community-based research in Indonesia.