JAKARTA — Didi, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, was a child when her mother left Indonesia for Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic worker. Her earnings paid for Didi’s education, though the move separated them during Didi’s childhood.
“It was hard growing up, but the older I get, the more I understand why my mother did what she did,” Didi said.
Years later, Didi left Indonesia herself. The 25-year-old resigned from an office job at one of the country’s major banks and moved to Japan.
“I knew living in this country is a dead end, and if I want to live the way I want to live, I have to be radical,” she said.
By then, she had seen how overseas earnings could change a family’s finances and pay for opportunities at home.
When asked, “Would you ever want your child to follow your path in leaving?,” she says, “I was to have a child in this very expensive lifetime, I would tell them that there’s so much to see in the world than their little boxes of neighbourhoods.”
People often begin learning about migration years before they apply for a visa. Family experience can provide information about foreign work, while schools may introduce overseas options through language courses, university counselling, scholarship notices and contact with graduates abroad.
Such exposure may shape later decisions, although income, visa rules, employment opportunities and family responsibilities still affect whether migration is possible.
Migration in the Family
Children in migrant-sending areas may learn the names of destination countries through ordinary family conversation. Saudi Arabia is where a mother works. Taiwan is where a neighbour found a job. Malaysia comes up during discussions about contracts, wages, return dates and phone calls home.
A 2024 study in Demographic Research calls the knowledge and resources accumulated through such experiences “migration capital.”
Aude Bernard and Francisco Perales used retrospective data from people born in, or brought as children to, 15 European countries. Family migration history was associated with a greater probability of moving abroad during adulthood, with the strongest association among people whose mother and father had both migrated.
Childhood residence in another country had a stronger association with adult migration than parental history alone. The researchers said early experience could provide knowledge about the costs of moving and information connected to a particular destination.
The study concerns European migration histories, and Southeast Asian labour markets and migration rules differ. Its concept of migration capital, however, helps describe how attitudes, knowledge, skills and resources can accumulate through a family’s experience of migration.
Dr Shary Charlotte Henriette Pattipeilhy, a lecturer in international relations at Diponegoro University, approached those resources through a related framework: Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital.
“To migrate, we need capital,” Pattipeilhy told Migrant Times in written responses. Migrant Times translated her responses from Indonesian.
Economic capital includes the money required for flights, documents and living expenses. Cultural capital includes language ability and knowledge of immigration and employment rules.
Social capital provides access to both.
“Relatives who have already gone abroad for work can provide all of that because they have already experienced the difficulties of migration,” Pattipeilhy said.
An experienced relative may lend money, explain paperwork and costs, recommend an agency or employer, or warn an applicant about suspicious recruitment promises.
Pattipeilhy said access to these resources helped explain why young people in areas with many Indonesian migrant workers, including parts of Java’s northern coast, could be both more willing and more able to leave.
Migration could also become part of the local culture when overseas work was common across families and generations.
“It becomes a symbol of success that can encourage more people to migrate,” Pattipeilhy said.
Growing Up With a Parent Abroad
Parental migration can change household finances and daily care arrangements at the same time. Children may move into the care of a father, grandparent or another relative while one or both parents work overseas.
Sri Purwatiningsih’s study in Populasi used data from the Child Health and Migrant Parents in South-East Asia project, or CHAMPSEA. The research covered migrant and non-migrant households in Sukabumi and Tasikmalaya in West Java and Ponorogo and Tulungagung in East Java.
The study included 444 young adults aged 17 to 19 and 470 children aged 11 to 13. More than 80 per cent had been told that a parent planned to work abroad, though being informed did not mean the child had taken part in the decision.
Among the young adults, 71.2 per cent said they felt sad and missed their mother when she migrated. The corresponding figure for a migrant father was 50.8 per cent.
Among the younger children, 59.76 per cent said they felt sad and missed their mother when she migrated.
Some of these young people nevertheless wanted to migrate.
Young adults whose mother and father had both worked abroad recorded the highest desire to migrate, at 76.92 per cent. They had experienced the absence of both parents and received care from other family members.
Purwatiningsih said the locations covered by CHAMPSEA were established migrant-sending areas where international migration was embedded in social and economic life.
Because overseas work was common and socially normalised, young people could grow up seeing it not only as a way to earn money but also as a familiar life trajectory.
“Children from households where both parents were migrants appeared to experience greater emotional and psychological pressures, especially due to prolonged parental absence and care arrangements,” Purwatiningsih told Migrant Times.
“However, despite these emotional burdens, they also showed relatively strong aspirations to migrate internationally themselves.”
The paper found that more than half of migrant mothers and fathers cited their children’s education as a reason for leaving. Earnings were also used for daily expenses and property.
The results could be visible to children in improved housing, stronger household finances and greater access to education. A child could therefore experience the emotional cost of separation while also seeing the material benefits associated with migration.
“Compared to many non-migrant households, migrant families were often perceived as having better living conditions, stronger financial stability, improved housing or greater educational opportunities,” Purwatiningsih said.
She described parental migration as having a “complex dual effect”: emotional strain on one side and exposure to its perceived economic rewards on the other.
“For many young people in migrant-sending communities, these economic and social aspirations may outweigh the emotional difficulties they experienced during childhood,” Purwatiningsih said.
Didi experienced the separation caused by her mother’s departure. She also received the education that her mother’s work in Saudi Arabia had paid for.
Schools and Overseas Opportunities
Schools can make overseas study more imaginable by offering language courses, counselling and guidance on admissions, costs and visas. Former students may also provide practical information about living expenses and adjustment after arrival.
UNESCO reported that nearly 7.3 million higher-education students studied outside their home countries in 2023, up from 2.1 million in 2000. They accounted for about 3 per cent of higher-education students worldwide.
Access remains uneven. Language examinations and application fees come before tuition and travel, and students at schools with experienced counsellors may receive information that is difficult to obtain elsewhere.
The Indonesian CHAMPSEA data found a large difference in migration aspirations by education level. Among the young adults surveyed, 3.07 per cent of those whose education ended at primary school wanted to migrate.
The figure was 44.79 per cent among those with junior-high-school education and 52.15 per cent among high-school graduates. The data show an association and do not establish that education caused the difference.
Education can provide qualifications and information about work elsewhere. It can also raise expectations about pay and the kinds of jobs a young person considers suitable.
A Young Lives working paper followed 3,353 young people in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam from childhood to age 19. The research concerned internal migration and examined when young people moved and why.
Migration was most common at ages 17 and 18. Study was the leading reason for moving across the countries, apart from girls in India, whose most common reason was marriage. Some participants moved before completing school, while others combined study with paid work after moving.
“Young individuals migrate very often even before having finished school,” the researchers wrote.
Money, Pressure and the Decision to Leave
Children may understand early that their future earnings will be expected to support the family. Discussions about school payments, medical costs or unstable income can affect how they judge local jobs and salaries abroad.
Pattipeilhy said migration could not be reduced to a simple question of free choice.
Economic hardship, family problems or the example of other migrant workers may push someone to consider leaving. Higher wages or jobs unavailable at home may pull them towards another country.
Whether that person migrates also depends on whether they have access to a legal route and the resources required to use it.
In Pattipeilhy’s view, people migrate not only because they want to, but because they are pushed towards migration, pulled by opportunities elsewhere and able to make the move.
Some migrant workers incur recruitment and travel costs before earning their first salary abroad.
A 2017 ILO and IOM report, Risks and Rewards: Outcomes of Labour Migration in South-East Asia drew on a regional survey of more than 1,800 migrant workers.
Workers had better outcomes when they avoided burdensome debt and received labour-rights protection. Skills gained abroad and employment after returning home also affected the longer-term result.
Without those conditions, the report described migration as a considerable financial gamble for workers and their families. Recruitment debt could absorb overseas earnings before a worker sent money home.
A child may see a house repaired with remittances without knowing how much the family borrowed before the worker left.
Pattipeilhy cautioned against treating economic hardship or family pressure as forces that automatically produce migration. People living under similar conditions may still make different decisions.
“Even when many people are poor, their families encourage them to migrate and conditions at home are difficult, many still do not choose migration,” she said.
Didi had seen what migration cost a family—and what it could make possible. Years later, after leaving Indonesia for Japan, her verdict was blunt.
“Do I regret moving? Nope,” Didi said.
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