As a country with diverse entry points such as airports, ports, land borders, and maritime borders, Indonesia has the potential to become a strong transit and destination country for immigrants. However, not all immigrants have official documents to settle or transit in Indonesia (legal), some immigrants want to settle or transit but do not have official documents (illegal).
Illegal immigrants, or often referred to as undocumented immigrants, are people who enter a country without meeting the legal requirements to enter that country. Makassar, as one of the central cities for trade and maritime transit, becomes a soft target area for illegal immigrants. Its strategic location is often considered a safe place.
Although some of them obtain residency permits in Indonesia, their activities are very limited, both adult males and females, as they are not allowed to seek livelihoods according to the regulations.
The South Sulawesi Regional Immigration Office of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights recorded 1999 illegal immigrants. Even for the Indonesian territory, the number reaches thousands. Various impacts will be faced with the entry of illegal immigrants into Indonesia, one of which is marriage. In some cases, there are marriages between local women and illegal immigrant men.
This drew the attention of one of the lecturers from the Faculty of Law (FH) of Hasanuddin University, Andi Syahwiah A Sapidin, to conduct research related to the impact of marriages between illegal immigrant men and Indonesian citizens (WNI).
In an interview conducted on Wednesday (01/06/2022), she stated that the main problem when they marry is that their marriage automatically becomes unregistered, which automatically becomes informal, so if a child is born, it will become a new conflict.
Informal marriage means that their marriage is not registered and does not have official documentation. They cannot have an official marriage certificate because the man does not have documents and is not officially registered in Indonesia.
Then, she explained another problem related to the citizenship status of their children, “When they have children, the problem is the unclear citizenship status of the children. This is because there are no official documents from the father as he is an illegal immigrant,” said Syahwiah.
The occurrence of this marriage is suspected because the appearance of immigrants is considered attractive by some local women, so there is a great opportunity to improve the physical appearance of offspring.
Furthermore, one of the lecturers of Constitutional Law at FH Unhas explained that there is actually a Foreigner Monitoring Team (Timpora) tasked with this.
“Timpora exists in this matter, however, it is less effective. Moreover, the pandemic becomes one of the factors of many things that are less effective, both in terms of funding and others,” said Syahwiah.
Although in an illegal state, the government cannot repatriate them to their home country. This is because there is a principle from the United Nations (UN) that governs this. Immigrants who leave their country are considered to have certain problems in their country such as war, religion, race, and so on, so they feel threatened.
Then, she continued that what the government should do is to socialize the impacts of these marriages, related to legal issues, and parties that may be harmed.
Syahwiah also explained that efforts to ban marriage cannot be done. This is because marriage is a personal matter, and its prohibition is considered a violation of human rights.
The government can only raise awareness about the risks of marrying illegal immigrants so that they are aware and prepared to face these risks.
She hopes that the government can be more active and make regulations that can actually be implemented. “We must make preventive efforts to provide awareness and knowledge to the public so that they understand the impacts,” she concluded.
Original Writer: Muhammad Mukram Mustamin
Translated by: A. Mario Farrasda AS & Nur Muthmainah
