Experts say Jakarta must accept unskilled migrants

JAKARTA (JP): The city could not close itself to unskilled migrants because there were not enough jobs in rural areas, a senior sociologist said yesterday.

Mely G. Tan, a researcher at the Indonesian Institute for Sciences, said the flow of unskilled migrants would continue despite the municipality's efforts to stop it since Ali Sadikin became governor in the early 1970s.

"The municipality has never succeeded in making Jakarta a closed city," Mely said.

"It was the unskilled migrants which built the city," Mely said.

"In the villages they have no more land as it has been changed to golf courses and housing areas," Mely said during a break at a conference on Asia's cities.

Governor Surjadi Soedirdja has said migrants planning to work in the city should be skilled because too many unskilled people added to the city's burdens.

The government and planners have called for more effort in creating growth centers besides Jakarta.

Mely said unskilled migrants would keep coming even though they were chased away.

After decades of chasing and land evictions Jakarta's underclass has proved to be "tough and highly adaptable to changes", she said.

It is these migrants' work in the informal sector which has prevented more unemployment, Mely said.

"But don't ask about their quality of life," she said.

As migrants were often without documents they were treated as non-persons and had no access to facilities like health care, she said.

She said the influx of poor migrants was a dilemma for the municipality. "We cannot just criticize."

Luckily developers, planners and architects "are beginning to see that beautiful structures must take people into account."

Tommy Firman, a professor in urban planning from the Bandung Institute of Technology, said the city was yet to recognize "that rich and poor live together here." Tommy said city planning was still insensitive about this.

"If drivers wait outside a building for their boss they could not be without the vendors," he said.

Tommy and Mely acknowledged the city had started to allocate space for vendors by ruling that shopping plazas, for instance, must provide places for vendors.

More of this needed to be done, while attractive sites outside Jakarta were yet to be developed, they said.

One of the speakers at the last day of the talks was from developer Ciputra. He talked on Ciputra's experiences in developing 10 new towns across Indonesia.

The organizer of the talks, closed by State Minister of Public Housing Akbar Tandjung yesterday, was the New York based Asia Society and the Center for Information and Development Studies. (anr)