Here come the migrants

Here come the migrants

In the wake of Idul Fitri, officials at the Jakarta city
administration are busy counting the newcomers coming into the
capital along with the millions of people returning from their
hometowns where they celebrated the Moslem post-fasting holiday
with relatives. This has become no more than a routine post-
holiday task because the influx of unskilled job seekers has
become as much of a tradition as the mudik, or holiday trip home.

This year the municipal statistics office expects 330,000 of
these migrants hoping for a better life in Jakarta. The
prediction is based on the average number of newcomers arriving
in the past, which has generally equaled 11 percent of the total
number of Jakartans who left the city before Idul Fitri.

Last year, 314,900 newcomers arrived here, or 10.52 percent of
the 2.9 million people who left Jakarta for the holiday.

Jakarta, which is already hard pressed to accommodate its
existing population of some 15 million, may find it difficult,
indeed, to cope with an additional 330,000, or possibly more,
newcomers.

For decades, the capital's population headaches have be
exacerbated by the ever increasing number of migrants who flood
into the city and illegally occupy state land, erecting shanties
almost anywhere they can find an empty lot.

These migrants present a security problem, as well as economic
and infrastructure difficulties, to the city because, despite the
hopes and dreams of the rural poor, it is very difficult for
unskilled people to get jobs in a metropolis where tens of
thousands of more educated people enter the job market every
year.

The unwary newcomers are lured into the winding alleyways of
the burgeoning slums by the semblance of wealth eagerly displayed
by holidayers intent on impressing their rural relatives with
their success in the capital. A lump sum of even Rp 100,000,
carefully scrounged over the period of a year by a servant or a
street vendor in the capital, can seem like a fortune to a poorly
educated resident of a poverty stricken village. This is not to
mention the other items like radios, tape players and any number
of gadgets that the travelers take home as proof of their
affluence. The images of bright lights and well off people in
beautiful clothes, spending their money in fancy restaurants,
broadcast on television only strengthen the impression.

This apparent proof that the capital is the land of
opportunity far outweighs the attempts of the government to
convince people otherwise. Even the Jakarta administration's
hard-hitting information drive, in cooperation with the West,
Central, East Java and South Sumatra provinces, describing the
harsh conditions and horrible facts of living in the capital, can
do little to curb the influx.

Even Jakarta Governor Surjadi Soedirja's order last year to
all municipal officials to make efforts to detect the emergence
of any new slum pockets so that they could be wiped out
immediately has had little impact on urbanization. Apparently the
policy is very difficult to implement at the district level
because nobody really knows how best to discourage the slum
dwellers from rebuilding once their shanties have been
demolished. It is also not very clear whether the plots of land
that belong to the state-owned railway company, a great number of
which are filled with shanties, are within the jurisdiction of
the governor.

In light of all of this, it seems it is high time for everyone
to acknowledge and act constructively on the fact that the flood
of newcomers would be more likely to slow to a trickle if
economic development were carried out more equitably with a
better spread of industrial projects in areas outside of Jakarta
and the other major urban centers.