Refugee Employment Prohibition in Indonesia

In Indonesia, the Immigration and the employment regulations prohibit the refugees from working. Meanwhile, the aids which are given to them are very limited. As a result, the refugees have difficulty to fulfill their needs. This condition makes the refugees work secretly and even commit criminal acts. This paper will examine the weaknesses of the rules prohibiting refugees from working and its solutions. The study was conducted in a normative legal research through library studies to obtain the secondary data which are analyzed with qualitative descriptive. Based on the results, this study found regulatory gaps in the field of the immigration and the employment that can be used by the refugees to work through informal employment schemes, apprenticeship and partnerships. The problem with these various schemes is very limited protections, both for the refugees and the employers. Therefore, the improvements and the arrangements need to be made by opening the employment opportunities for the refugees through a number of restrictions. These restrictions are related to the position and field of work that can be carried out by the refugees and the need for the local labor. The important restrictions are made to protect national interests, namely the availability of employment for the local workers.