SOCIAL CLASS, LANGUAGE, AND MIGRANT AGENCY: INDONESIAN WORKERS NAVIGATING TRANSNATIONAL LABOUR PATHWAYS:

Migration is frequently represented through statistics, policies, labour-market demands, remittance flows, and economic indicators. Yet behind every migration corridor, employment contract, and remittance figure is a human life: a person who leaves familiar places, languages, relationships, and routines in pursuit of security, opportunity, dignity, and a more hopeful future. When migration is understood primarily through institutional or economic categories, migrant workers can easily be reduced to units of labour, sources of foreign exchange, or objects of regulation. Their voices, knowledge, and lived experiences become secondary to the systems that recruit, classify, employ, and govern them.

This book begins from a different premise. It approaches Indonesian migrant workers not merely as participants in transnational labour markets, but as thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting subjects whose lives illuminate the complex intersections of social class, language, identity, power, mobility, and human agency. Through their narratives, migration becomes visible not as a distant demographic or economic phenomenon, but as a lived process shaped by aspiration and obligation, opportunity and inequality, sacrifice and uncertainty, resilience and hope