JAKARTA -** **Adelia Meysa was 23 when she died at Seinan Medical Centre Hospital in Ibaraki, Japan. She had been sick for a month and a half, complaining first of headaches at the back of her skull. She spent four days at a clinic, then seven days in intensive care. Her diagnosis was tuberculous meningitis.
Her family in Kampai village, Seluma, in the Bengkulu province learned about it through a video call from Japan.
Adelia was the youngest of four siblings. After finishing high school, she joined a training center that promised her legal work in Japan. She left Bengkulu around 2022, about three years ago. The training center sent her on a tourist visa with a promise that work papers would come after she arrived.
They never did.
She stayed anyway, working illegally, with no health insurance and no legal recourse when she got sick.
The bill to bring her body home started at 200 million rupiah, but after negotiations, it came down to 85 million. The provincial government covered 50 million. Public donations raised 35 million. Her body arrived at Fatmawati Airport in Bengkulu on November 14.
By early December, police had arrested the owner of the training center. Investigators found at least seven other people from Seluma who paid between 40 and 150 million rupiah for the same promise. Some are still waiting to be sent abroad, and some already made it to Japan on tourist visas and are living there illegally.
Adelia is a part of Indonesia’s migrant workers, a machinery system that sent back $16 billion in remittances last year. That’s about 1.1% of the country’s GDP, according to the United Nations. The numbers look like progress on a spreadsheet.
But the gap between what gets counted and what actually happens to people like Adelia reveals a system where legal paperwork and illegal operations exist side by side, where families pay fortunes for jobs that may or may not materialize.
A System Built to Protect Migrant Workers, But Few Know It Exists
"All the protection is already there," says Leotinus Alva Edison, the Deputy for Economic Empowerment and Migrant Worker Protection at the Coordinating Ministry for Community Empowerment. He's speaking at a packed auditorium at the Binus University in November. "The problem is that people don't know."
Edison came to his position from the private sector. He co-founded Tokopedia, one of Indonesia’s largest e-commerce platforms, and he admits he never knew the existence of Layanan Terpadu Satu Atap (LTSA) until he took office in January 2025.
LTSA is Indonesia's one-stop service centers designed to handle everything a prospective migrant worker needs from documentation, training referrals, legal counseling, and departure clearance. In theory, these centers should be the first and only stop for anyone wanting to work abroad legally.
In practice, most people have never heard of them.
"When I found out about LTSA and compared it to Tokopedia," Edison says, "it was far behind." The infrastructure exists and the legal pathways are there.
But illegal recruiters have better marketing. Edison explains that they show up in villages, post on Facebook, and also promise departure within a week. For people on the brink of desperation, it’s a lot better than the six months of language training the legal route requires.
Edison's solution is borrowed from his years building an e-commerce company, and that is to outwork the competition. "If they post once a week, we post twice a week. If they post three times a week, we post every day. We cannot let legal agencies lose to illegal ones."
It's a marketing war, he says, and the government has been losing because it hasn't been showing up.
Couple that with the economic anxiety many Indonesians are experiencing — especially after the world shut down in 2020 because of COVID, the slow recovery, and the Rupiah’s sinking buying power — and it’s a recipe for disaster. People started looking for overseas jobs out of desperation, and without proper information, they’re prone to turn to illegal recruiters.
Digital Trafficking in Southeast Asia
Wahyu Susilo, Executive Director of Migrant Care, brings up a threat that didn't exist a decade ago but has exploded since COVID-19: digital trafficking.
"Post-pandemic COVID-19 has accelerated the use of digital technology," Wahyu says via Zoom from Jakarta. "But it has also led to the abuse of digital technology when media is used for recruitment into exploitative jobs without oversight. This can result in workers being trapped in unsafe migration schemes and falling into the trap of human trafficking."
Young people, often university graduates with degrees in computer science or IT, see job ads online. High salaries with low requirements for positions as programmers, digital operators, customer service roles in tech hubs. They fly out legally and end up trapped in compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, forced to run online scams and gambling operations.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has recorded more than 10,000 cases of online fraud involving Indonesians since 2020. Of those, approximately 1,500 are classified as human trafficking victims under Indonesian law.
"Ironically, those we handle include computer science graduates, IT graduates," Wahyu says. "They go to the Mekong region—Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. The promise is work in the digital sector, as operators, as programmers. But in reality, they're forced to commit online fraud."
And despite ASEAN’s multiple frameworks and declarations about protecting migrant workers, human trafficking keeps happening in the region. Wahyu's answer is blunt, "ASEAN's modalities are mostly just paper. There are many declarations, many agreements, many documents—including the ASEAN Vision 2045—but most of it is just rhetoric."
He points to the TIP Report from the U.S. State Department, which identifies state sponsorship for these scamming operations in Myanmar, Cambodia, and China. "That's what makes post-criminality thrive in the Mekong region," he says.
Indonesia signed an ASEAN Leaders' Declaration on Combating Trafficking in Persons by the Abuse of Technology when it chaired ASEAN. But Wahyu says there's been no follow-up. "Until now, this document is still just a concern from civil society because there's no follow-through."
The legal tools Indonesia has don't fit the crime. "Law Number 21 of 2007 on Trafficking in Persons cannot reach new forms of trafficking through digital crimes like this," Wahyu says. "That's why we want to push for a revision of the anti-trafficking law to also cover crimes based on digital technology."
Migrant Care has been pushing tech platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram—to commit to not facilitating or profiting from trafficking. They've also been urging airlines to do the same. But without updated laws and regional cooperation that goes beyond paper declarations, the scamming operations keep growing.
Too Many Agencies, Not Enough Coordination
Dini Putri Saraswati, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at UPN Veteran Jakarta, puts it simply, "The legal foundation is already there. The institutions exist. The system is there. But coordination is the problem."
Four major agencies handle different pieces of migrant worker protection in Indonesia.
There's Kemenko PMK, the Coordinating Ministry for Community Empowerment, where Edison works.
There's BP2MI, the Agency for the Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers, which handles placement and operational services.
There's Kemenaker, the Ministry of Manpower. And there's Kemenlu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which manages consular protection abroad through embassies and consulates.
All of them are supposed to work together. In practice, Dini says, there's "sectoral ego." Each agency has its mandate, its turf, its priorities. When those priorities don't align, workers fall through the cracks.
The protection workers receive abroad depends heavily on where they end up. In Malaysia, Indonesia has a full embassy, the KBRI (Kedutaan Besar Republik Indonesia), with consular staff dedicated to handling worker issues. In Taiwan, there's no diplomatic relationship, so protection falls to KDEI, the Indonesian Economic and Trade Office. A trade office trying to do the work of an embassy.
"This is one of the crucial issues," Dini says. "Everyone wants to contribute to solving the human rights problems experienced by migrant workers. But there are so many gaps, so many blind spots, that coordination often overlaps or misses entirely."
The biggest challenge is when workers are unregistered – those who travel on tourist visas or through illegal channels, like Adelia. When a crisis hits, whether a natural disaster, a political conflict, or a pandemic, the government has no reliable way to locate them. Authorities are unable to evacuate people they can’t identify, nor provide assistance to workers whose whereabouts are not documented.
Dini points out the importance of data. Real-time data systems that track where Indonesian workers are, what sectors they're working in, who to contact in an emergency. "If the data is complete, if the data exists, we can map out where our migrant workers are. And when something happens, they know where to get help."
The Skills Workers Need to Survive Abroad
The training centers that prepare Indonesian workers for jobs abroad focus heavily on technical skills. Caregivers would learn how to assist elderly patients, welders would practice their technique, and hospitality workers would study hotel operations.
But Dini argues that's only half of what workers actually need to survive overseas. Technical skills get them hired, but it’s the survival skills that keep them safe.
"Training shouldn't only focus on job skills but also survival skills," she says during her presentation. "Not just, 'okay, you need to have these technical abilities,' but also how to read contracts, how to adapt in a new environment, how to maintain mental health in a new environment, and so on."
Contract reading is important. Workers need to understand what they're signing, what the terms actually mean, what protections they should expect. "They need to know: oh, this is what a clear work contract looks like. If you're working, you have to use safety equipment," Dini says, referring to APD, personal protective equipment that's standard in industrial jobs but not always explained to workers before they leave.
The other piece is knowing where to turn when things go wrong. "They need to know the emergency contact, where to go if there's a natural disaster, if there are issues related to climate change, or other problems. They can (reach out), they know where to go," Dini says.
These problems feed each other. Workers who don't know about LTSA turn to illegal recruiters. Those recruiters target people with fake digital jobs. When workers get trapped abroad, uncoordinated agencies can't find them. And even when they do, workers who were never taught survival skills don't know where to ask for help.
Migrant Workers Protect Indonesia, Not the Other Way Around
Indonesia calls migrant workers Pahlawan Devisa, foreign exchange heroes, and the title isn't just ceremonial. The millions of Indonesian workers abroad sent home billions of US dollars in remittances last year. That money builds houses, pays for school fees, keeps entire families afloat.
Remittances reach deep into rural economies, with entire communities depending on money sent home from abroad. But these remittances don't just help individual households. They prop up regional economies, stabilize the rupiah, and contribute to GDP growth.
"Don't let it be that migrant workers are called heroes of foreign exchange—and yes, that's true because they contribute so much in remittances—but actually, they're the ones maintaining sustainability in our economy," Dini says.
"It's not that we're protecting them, but they're protecting us."
And the implication is clear: when migrant workers sustain the economy, their protection becomes an obligation, not an act of charity.
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