Threading the thin line between conscience and bureaucracy
A story of a small victory at the border
The author is a technical policy analyst at the Migrant Workers Protection Ministry (KP2MI) in Riau Islands. This article is a winning submission to The Reformist Insiders Writing Competition 2026. It reflects the author’s own analysis and views and does not necessarily represent those of The Reformist.
This article is also available in Indonesian here.
It was another day where I watched yet another group of men dragging suitcases and hauling large backpacks into our office. It was not an unusual sight. For the past year, working as a verification officer at the Indonesian Migrant Worker Protection Service Post (P4MI) in Batam, I had grown used to receiving them. Their faces looked rushed and panicked.
“Immigration told us to report here,” said one of the migrant merchant seafarers.
“What is your job?” I asked.
“A sailor, ma’am,” he replied.
Issues surrounding seafarers, whom we typically refer to as Migrant Merchant Ship Crew and Migrant Fishing Vessel Crew officially, and seafarers colloquially, began surfacing in early 2025. Rejections of seafarers at several international ports bordering Singapore and Malaysia, including Batam Centre International Port, Harbour Bay Port, and Sekupang International Port, came as a surprise. It turned out that these seafarers were required to have an e-PMI, an electronic identity card proving their status as Indonesian migrant workers formally registered in the system of the Migrant Workers Protection Ministry (KP2MI).
Yet there had been no directive from the central government and no widespread outreach about the obligation for seafarers to hold an e-PMI. There was also resistance from some seafarers: in their view, their identity was that of a sailor, not a migrant worker.
The placement framework for seafarers had never been implemented since Law No. 18/2017 on the Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers was enacted. Article 4 of the law stipulates that merchant ship crew and fishing vessel crew are classified as Indonesian Migrant Workers. The technical provisions are further regulated under Government Regulation No. 22/2022 on the Placement and Protection of Migrant Merchant Ship Crew and Migrant Fishing Vessel Crew.
But the regulation appeared to be unknown to seafarers. Many asked why it had been enforced so suddenly, without any government outreach.
At the time, we could only offer the normative answer that the regulation had been in place since 2022. We often heard the reply: “Ma’am, I have been a sailor for years. This is the first time I have ever been turned away like this. And all my documents are complete.”
I found it deeply ironic. Rather than protecting migrant workers, the existing rules had ended up restricting their mobility at the border.
It is upsetting that after being refused to pass at immigration, the seafarers faced more rejections at our office. From early to mid-2025, over 300 seafarers were turned away, and of those, only 40 were able to have their e-PMI processed.
The rejections occurred because most crew members had not completed the documents required by the registration system. On average, seafarers only had a passport, a seaman’s book, and a Letter of Guarantee in lieu of a visa. Some also did not have employment contracts, as their experience had been that contracts would be signed upon arrival or after completing a medical check-up in the destination country.
For months, the problem dragged on without resolution. We had reported the issues to our supervisors, but being in daily conflict with seafarers took a moral and mental toll. On one hand, we were obliged to provide services; on the other, as part of the system, we could not avoid turning people away. Being caught in the middle was exhausting.
After careful consideration, we took the initiative to draft a letter to the relevant directorate within our ministry, KP2MI, so that the central office could provide clarity and help minimize rejections. Once the draft was ready, we asked our supervisors to help escalate it to the centre.
BP3MI Kepulauan Riau, the ministry’s regional unit overseeing our office, assisted in sending the letter to the directorate responsible for seafarers. The letter outlined the rejections seafarers faced, the limited documents it typically held, and a regulatory inconsistency: the law required a visa as a mandatory document, while seafarers held a Guarantee Letter instead.
Following guidance from the central government, a total of 1,345 e-PMIs were issued throughout 2025 under the individual seafarer scheme. This shed new light on migrant worker data we had not previously had, revealing that seafarers in Singapore and Malaysia dominated placement numbers. But because of regulatory barriers, their presence had gone unrecorded all along. It marked a bureaucratic breakthrough.
Yet even with implementation underway, confusion across sectors had not fully cleared.
On one occasion, crew members working for a company operating an Indonesian-flagged vessel were turned away at immigration for not having an e-PMI. When they came to our office, they were turned away again, this time because we had no authority over crew working for local companies holding a Ship Crew Agency Business Licence (SIUKAK), as that fell under the Transportation Ministry’s Directorate General of Sea Transportation.
Confusion at the top, a dualism unresolved
Despite regulatory advancements, dualism and contentions persist between KP2MI and the Transportation Ministry. Alongside the e-PMI issued by KP2MI, there is a separate card, the Seafarer Identity Card (SID), issued by the ministry. In November 2024, the Indonesian Embassy in Singapore began issuing e-SIDs for seafarers, and to this day, seafarers based in Singapore remain under the transport attaché’s jurisdiction.
Looking more closely, the two existing frameworks stem from different references. The e-PMI derives from Law No. 18/2017, which draws on the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families. Meanwhile, the SID is a manifestation of ILO Convention No. 185 on the Seafarers’ Identity Documents Convention.
While both are legally valid, they create confusion because, as far as seafarers are concerned, both are government products. So why are they not merged into one? That question remains unanswered, as both institutions continue to carry out their respective sectoral mandates without harmonisation, leaving problems that should be resolved at the central level to be dealt with at the service counter instead.
This cross-sectoral policy incoherence is worsened by on-the-ground rejections that create uncertainty, costing ships time, money, and effort—and causing seafarers to lose job opportunities. Of all those affected, the greatest burden falls on the very people the system is supposed to protect: Indonesian Migrant Workers, including seafarers. The protective function of the e-PMI is not fully understood, because the fear of being held at immigration and losing a job looms far larger.
Despite doing our best to serve, our work was not without fault in the eyes of others.
One day, a senior official from the central office paid a visit. He summoned my colleague and me, who had been processing cases at the time. I was interrogated as though I had committed a criminal act, because the employment contracts of some of the seafarers were dated the following day rather than that day. I argued that, as far as I understood, seafarers typically sign contracts upon arrival in the destination country or on board, given the differences between sea-based and land-based placement procedures.
The senior official insisted I was wrong, dismissing my eight years of experience at this post. “After all this time working here, you still don’t understand anything,” he said.
The same official also added a new layer of complexity by requiring sailors to attach a letter of permission from their families. Such is bureaucratic culture in Indonesia: senior officials cannot be contradicted. Meanwhile, the situation at the border, where rejections kept happening, continued to pile up.
The dilemma led me to contact the relevant directorate handling seafarers directly, having come to realise that the senior official did not come from the unit responsible for this area. When I raised the issue, they responded that it was a good thing that seafarers were willing to be registered at all, and that making it harder for them would only mean more going unrecorded, which would create even bigger problems down the line.
Working in this institution feels like standing at a crossroads, constantly forced to choose between conscience and bureaucracy. The seafarers do not care about sectoral mandates; they simply want an easier path to earning a living, and that hope lands on the service counter.
For me, a small victory is the brightened face of a sailor walking out with his backpack and an e-PMI in hand.
Read winning articles from our first Writing Competition on our site: thereformist.id. The Bahasa Indonesia series can be found in the “Insiders” section. New article every week!
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