7 ms·

No ID, no vaccines for Indonesia’s invisible people

69 points by nnx 5y ago

renewiltord 5y ago
This is a common problem in Asia. One of my friends works on helping disadvantaged communities in India get identified (get government identification, get voter IDs, get their actions tracked) and another works on making sure their homes are tracked on government services. Governments only serve the people they know about. The standard of service for these people increases substantially when they're no longer invisible. They get a ration shop, voter booths, that sort of thing.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  What makes this so common in Asia? The vast majority of undocumented people in the US is from illegal immigration. Is that what drives it there too?
  - rataata_jr 5y ago
    For India, yes. There are illegal immigrants from say, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc.
    - mangamadaiyan 5y ago
      Not too sure about it being just illegal immigrants. Many of the people who migrate across states are also "invisible" and do not possess identification. This situation is improving, but arguably not by much.
      - rataata_jr 5y ago
        I agree. Lots of legal migrants from the east and Bihar to the south.
  - FriedrichN 5y ago
    The relationship with government is very different from the western model in many countries. People just live and die without much interference from government, in some rural places people don't even know their age. It's hard to imagine for people living in industrialized and urbanized places, but many people still live that way worldwide.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      Or it was illegal for them to be born: https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-policy/index.html https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-... (at least illegal for their parents). Westerners think the Chinese murdered female babies, but I remember reading (citation needed?) that the female babies mostly end up being undocumented.
      - jimmaswell 5y ago
        It still went on to a significant degree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      It was the same in the US until very recently. The idea that we would all be tracked from birth to death was a horror to most people, and a sign of the apocalypse to a lot of Christians. I think the disappearance (and formalization) of home births started the movement in the other direction, along with Social Security cards inevitably being used as identification numbers. Anti-immigration drives during the Clinton administration and after 9/11 (both resulting in the RealID push) were the nails in the coffin. edit: my grandmother didn't even know her birth name until she was middle-aged. She just got ID with the name she had always gone by, because birth documentation wasn't required.
      - schoen 5y ago
        My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at the state level, or for some purposes county level, while the military draft is handled at the federal level.) Of course, if I hadn't had one, there are tons of things that I wouldn't have been able to do (like official employment, banking, and credit, to start with). Military conscription is a huge impetus for population registration and tracking. In the U.S. there hasn't been conscription since before I was born, but there's still an agency that notionally registers military-aged men and their whereabouts, with intermittent halfheartedness and minimal enforcement. (My recollection is that all of the enforcement actions for the past few decades have been against men who wrote open letters refusing to register, or something, as opposed to those who simply forgot or declined to register.) James Scott has written extensively about how many people in history didn't want to be tracked by (or "legible" to) the state, because this would subject them to conscription and taxation. The idea that conscription or taxation are good and that you should want to be subject to them (either because of a theory of political legitimacy or because of benefits that they will personally bring you or your neighbors) is kind of a historical anomaly, although very widespread today. I do think the idea that you would be better off if you and the state didn't interact than if you did feels most plausible in a rural farming environment, and least plausible in a city in an industrialized society -- not that many people still don't wish to be, or think about being, free of the state, but that it's obviously taken up such an enormous role in life that it feels like a huge sacrifice to be totally invisible to it. A big trend over time all around the world, especially following the industrial revolution, has been higher taxes and more government services. Even if you don't personally feel this was a good trade-off, a whole lot of parts of life would "break" for you if you were outside of it.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    It's probably poverty and the fact that the government bureaucracy doesn't do an extensive job of tracking its citizens. It's possibly the same in Africa. It just so happens that I know about Asia. Western countries are unbelievably wealthy and they have crazy effective information infrastructure. I suspect this is not common across the globe. Many people may barely have a birth certificate. In many of these countries, the infrastructure is like the UK pre-Domesday-Book. There may be people living in a village that is unmarked on the maps. For the people my friends last worked with, they were in a fishing shanty town in the Indian state of Karnataka that was unnamed (officially) until recently. Strange, eh? People just agglomerate somewhere without incorporating a municipality or anything because they have to survive.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  What's the tax situation like for these people? Do they have any new responsibilities after being "found" by the government?
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Generally speaking the people who are not tracked are part of marginalized groups (which is often why they weren't trying to engage in the first place and why government wanted nothing to do with them) that tend to have an on again off again somewhat abusive relationship with government. By signing up you might get healthcare today but the contents of your row in the database could get you screwed if political winds shift (having the wrong religion or ethnicity on your official government records is a much bigger liability outside the west).
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      That's kind of what I was wondering. I can't imagine a person in modern governments being unknown unless they had no interest in being known, is that out of ignorance of what the government is offering them or because the tradeoffs arnt worth it to them?
      - Clewza313 5y ago
        The Operasi Koteka debacle of the early 1970s is a nice illustration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka TL;DR: The government objected to Papuan tribesmen wearing only penis gourds and airdropped a bunch of pants for them, with predictable results.
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        At least in India it's because interacting with the government is a huge pain in the ass. You don't do it unless you have to. It just so happens that it's rapidly becoming the case that you do have to.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    India's lowest tax bracket is zero-taxed. That's up to 20k INR (270 USD) monthly. You don't have to file if you have zero tax (unless you meet one of the other weird conditions that is aimed at people who make lots of money in 'weird' ways - abroad, cap gains, etc.). In practice, these people don't have to file. The increased responsibilities are: * They're tied to the national ID which has biometrics and all that shite * If they make more than the exemption (which can happen occasionally) they have to file now. In practice, they'll just dodge it since they work 'informally' (i.e. the guy who goes out fishing and then has his wife sell at the local market isn't having income deducted by an 'employer') * I don't recall particularly, but I think they also stick you with a religion and an ethnicity field (for affirmative action stuff). Not sure about this so check. This one makes me nervous if it's real. But it's just so much more beneficial to be known to exist. If the government simply doesn't know, it won't particularly look. Some bureaucrat in the big city will look at the blank spot and put a desal plant there and then they'll come evict you. At least if you are known to exist, you can fight the eviction temporarily or get some money.
- rmah 5y ago
  This is a common problem in poor nations and probably worse in the larger ones. Poor nations simply cannot afford the infrastructure necessary to maintain a deep bureaucracy that tracks everything and everyone. In addition, some of the people living there are not educated and too poor to bother with interacting with the government for a wide variety of reasons. Indonesia in particular is a HUGE nation and makes Mexico look wealthy. Over 270 mil people, on thousands of islands, stretching across thousands of miles. Personally, I'm amazed it's been able to hold itself together over the decades.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Well, technically it hasn't, since Timor-Leste split off in 2002. And there have been and remain separatist tendencies of various strengths in Papua, Aceh, Maluku, etc. What has held Indonesia together is the overwhelming dominance of the Javanese, through a combination of (comparative) economic might, weight of numbers, repression and neglect of the rest.
ihsw 5y ago
This is where government-enforced cultural domination leads us to, proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) should take note.
pingec 5y ago
One strange thing (to me) about Indonesian ID cards is that they have a compulsory field "Religion" where one must choose one of six possible religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. If one is without religion or follows another religion he must still pick one of those 6. Another strange thing (to me) is the complex dependency between institutions. In order to be able to apply for various things like documents, benefits, scholarship, school admission etc. one needs approval from head of family then head of the village, then letter from the police and so on. Be on bad terms with any of these (individuals) and some government services are unavailable to you. I heard a story from and Indonesian about how he could not go to university because the head of the village didn't want to give him the letter that he needed to apply to university. Also marriage between members of different religions is not possible. So one person must convert to the other's religion before they can be married.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- basementcat 5y ago
  A "religion" field in government documents is fairly common. In many countries, some tax revenues are given to religious institutions proportional to the number of citizens that belong to that religion.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    That doesn't make any sense if there's no non-religious category
    - Cerium 5y ago
      Where would the tax money go? /s
      - m-p-3 5y ago
        To /dev/null
plinkplonk 5y ago
India also demands government Id for covid vaccination. No Id, no vaccine. ( These days there is a desperate shortage of vaccines for everyone, which is another story for another time)
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Doesn't India have a large population of people who are born and die outside the system, no ID?
  - vkou 5y ago
    Fortunately, COVID-19 is happy to respect beurocratic boundaries imposed on it.

69 points by nnx 5y ago

This is a common problem in Asia. One of my friends works on helping disadvantaged communities in India get identified (get government identification, get voter IDs, get their actions tracked) and another works on making sure their homes are tracked on government services. Governments only serve the people they know about. The standard of service for these people increases substantially when they're no longer invisible. They get a ration shop, voter booths, that sort of thing.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
What makes this so common in Asia? The vast majority of undocumented people in the US is from illegal immigration. Is that what drives it there too?
- rataata_jr 5y ago
  For India, yes. There are illegal immigrants from say, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc.
  - mangamadaiyan 5y ago
    Not too sure about it being just illegal immigrants. Many of the people who migrate across states are also "invisible" and do not possess identification. This situation is improving, but arguably not by much.
    - rataata_jr 5y ago
      I agree. Lots of legal migrants from the east and Bihar to the south.
- FriedrichN 5y ago
  The relationship with government is very different from the western model in many countries. People just live and die without much interference from government, in some rural places people don't even know their age. It's hard to imagine for people living in industrialized and urbanized places, but many people still live that way worldwide.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Or it was illegal for them to be born: https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-policy/index.html https://www.vocativ.com/world/china/ghosts-chinas-one-child-... (at least illegal for their parents). Westerners think the Chinese murdered female babies, but I remember reading (citation needed?) that the female babies mostly end up being undocumented.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      It still went on to a significant degree. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    It was the same in the US until very recently. The idea that we would all be tracked from birth to death was a horror to most people, and a sign of the apocalypse to a lot of Christians. I think the disappearance (and formalization) of home births started the movement in the other direction, along with Social Security cards inevitably being used as identification numbers. Anti-immigration drives during the Clinton administration and after 9/11 (both resulting in the RealID push) were the nails in the coffin. edit: my grandmother didn't even know her birth name until she was middle-aged. She just got ID with the name she had always gone by, because birth documentation wasn't required.
    - schoen 5y ago
      My mom was reluctant to get me a Social Security card because she thought it would increase my risk of being drafted. (In the U.S., birth records are handled at the state level, or for some purposes county level, while the military draft is handled at the federal level.) Of course, if I hadn't had one, there are tons of things that I wouldn't have been able to do (like official employment, banking, and credit, to start with). Military conscription is a huge impetus for population registration and tracking. In the U.S. there hasn't been conscription since before I was born, but there's still an agency that notionally registers military-aged men and their whereabouts, with intermittent halfheartedness and minimal enforcement. (My recollection is that all of the enforcement actions for the past few decades have been against men who wrote open letters refusing to register, or something, as opposed to those who simply forgot or declined to register.) James Scott has written extensively about how many people in history didn't want to be tracked by (or "legible" to) the state, because this would subject them to conscription and taxation. The idea that conscription or taxation are good and that you should want to be subject to them (either because of a theory of political legitimacy or because of benefits that they will personally bring you or your neighbors) is kind of a historical anomaly, although very widespread today. I do think the idea that you would be better off if you and the state didn't interact than if you did feels most plausible in a rural farming environment, and least plausible in a city in an industrialized society -- not that many people still don't wish to be, or think about being, free of the state, but that it's obviously taken up such an enormous role in life that it feels like a huge sacrifice to be totally invisible to it. A big trend over time all around the world, especially following the industrial revolution, has been higher taxes and more government services. Even if you don't personally feel this was a good trade-off, a whole lot of parts of life would "break" for you if you were outside of it.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  It's probably poverty and the fact that the government bureaucracy doesn't do an extensive job of tracking its citizens. It's possibly the same in Africa. It just so happens that I know about Asia. Western countries are unbelievably wealthy and they have crazy effective information infrastructure. I suspect this is not common across the globe. Many people may barely have a birth certificate. In many of these countries, the infrastructure is like the UK pre-Domesday-Book. There may be people living in a village that is unmarked on the maps. For the people my friends last worked with, they were in a fishing shanty town in the Indian state of Karnataka that was unnamed (officially) until recently. Strange, eh? People just agglomerate somewhere without incorporating a municipality or anything because they have to survive.
thatguy0900 5y ago
What's the tax situation like for these people? Do they have any new responsibilities after being "found" by the government?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Generally speaking the people who are not tracked are part of marginalized groups (which is often why they weren't trying to engage in the first place and why government wanted nothing to do with them) that tend to have an on again off again somewhat abusive relationship with government. By signing up you might get healthcare today but the contents of your row in the database could get you screwed if political winds shift (having the wrong religion or ethnicity on your official government records is a much bigger liability outside the west).
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    That's kind of what I was wondering. I can't imagine a person in modern governments being unknown unless they had no interest in being known, is that out of ignorance of what the government is offering them or because the tradeoffs arnt worth it to them?
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      The Operasi Koteka debacle of the early 1970s is a nice illustration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka TL;DR: The government objected to Papuan tribesmen wearing only penis gourds and airdropped a bunch of pants for them, with predictable results.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      At least in India it's because interacting with the government is a huge pain in the ass. You don't do it unless you have to. It just so happens that it's rapidly becoming the case that you do have to.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  India's lowest tax bracket is zero-taxed. That's up to 20k INR (270 USD) monthly. You don't have to file if you have zero tax (unless you meet one of the other weird conditions that is aimed at people who make lots of money in 'weird' ways - abroad, cap gains, etc.). In practice, these people don't have to file. The increased responsibilities are: * They're tied to the national ID which has biometrics and all that shite * If they make more than the exemption (which can happen occasionally) they have to file now. In practice, they'll just dodge it since they work 'informally' (i.e. the guy who goes out fishing and then has his wife sell at the local market isn't having income deducted by an 'employer') * I don't recall particularly, but I think they also stick you with a religion and an ethnicity field (for affirmative action stuff). Not sure about this so check. This one makes me nervous if it's real. But it's just so much more beneficial to be known to exist. If the government simply doesn't know, it won't particularly look. Some bureaucrat in the big city will look at the blank spot and put a desal plant there and then they'll come evict you. At least if you are known to exist, you can fight the eviction temporarily or get some money.
rmah 5y ago
This is a common problem in poor nations and probably worse in the larger ones. Poor nations simply cannot afford the infrastructure necessary to maintain a deep bureaucracy that tracks everything and everyone. In addition, some of the people living there are not educated and too poor to bother with interacting with the government for a wide variety of reasons. Indonesia in particular is a HUGE nation and makes Mexico look wealthy. Over 270 mil people, on thousands of islands, stretching across thousands of miles. Personally, I'm amazed it's been able to hold itself together over the decades.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Well, technically it hasn't, since Timor-Leste split off in 2002. And there have been and remain separatist tendencies of various strengths in Papua, Aceh, Maluku, etc. What has held Indonesia together is the overwhelming dominance of the Javanese, through a combination of (comparative) economic might, weight of numbers, repression and neglect of the rest.

ihsw 5y ago

This is where government-enforced cultural domination leads us to, proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) should take note.

pingec 5y ago

One strange thing (to me) about Indonesian ID cards is that they have a compulsory field "Religion" where one must choose one of six possible religions: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. If one is without religion or follows another religion he must still pick one of those 6. Another strange thing (to me) is the complex dependency between institutions. In order to be able to apply for various things like documents, benefits, scholarship, school admission etc. one needs approval from head of family then head of the village, then letter from the police and so on. Be on bad terms with any of these (individuals) and some government services are unavailable to you. I heard a story from and Indonesian about how he could not go to university because the head of the village didn't want to give him the letter that he needed to apply to university. Also marriage between members of different religions is not possible. So one person must convert to the other's religion before they can be married.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
basementcat 5y ago
A "religion" field in government documents is fairly common. In many countries, some tax revenues are given to religious institutions proportional to the number of citizens that belong to that religion.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  That doesn't make any sense if there's no non-religious category
  - Cerium 5y ago
    Where would the tax money go? /s
    - m-p-3 5y ago
      To /dev/null

plinkplonk 5y ago

India also demands government Id for covid vaccination. No Id, no vaccine. ( These days there is a desperate shortage of vaccines for everyone, which is another story for another time)

jimmaswell 5y ago
Doesn't India have a large population of people who are born and die outside the system, no ID?
- vkou 5y ago
  Fortunately, COVID-19 is happy to respect beurocratic boundaries imposed on it.