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.