Indonesia's citizenship plan has a class problem

Indonesia is preparing to soften its one-passport rule, and three researchers writing for Indonesia at Melbourne want to know who exactly gets the benefit. Under the proposed revision of Law 12 of 2006, dual citizenship would go only to people nominated by a ministry or a state agency, in categories such as researchers, nuclear scientists, medical specialists and athletes. Everyone else stays under the old rule, including the domestic workers, builders, farm labourers and carers whose money sent home has held up the economy for decades.

Annisa Dina Amalia, Monika Winarnita and Charlotte Setijadi call this a classed idea of who counts as diaspora, and the contrast with sport makes it sharp. Close to 90% of a recent national football squad were naturalised citizens, most through a distant ancestor. Two Australian-born players, Mitchell Baker and Luke Vickery, were naturalised within three days of each other in July. Nationality can move very fast when the state wants something specific.

The rest of the policy pulls the other way. From 1 August the fee to give up Indonesian citizenship rose fivefold, from Rp1 million to Rp5 million, under Government Regulation 30 of 2026. The Global Citizenship of Indonesia visa, launched in January, gave residency rights only and drew few takers. President Prabowo has told people unhappy with the government to go and find another country. The authors add that Indonesia keeps no proper data on brain drain, so nobody can actually show that the shortage this bill claims to fix exists. The Indonesian Diaspora Network wants "diaspora" defined in law and foreign labour sorted into tiers; the current draft skips both.

Why it matters

If you work abroad in care, construction, farming or someone's house, this bill is not written for you, and the cost of formally leaving has just gone up. If you are the skilled kind the state wants, your route runs through a ministry's recommendation rather than a rule you can read for yourself. Watch whether parliament puts a legal definition of "diaspora" into the text, because that is what separates a policy from a list of favours.