The Mobility of Population at Sub-Urban Area in Gempol Village, Pasuruan Regency, East Java

Abstract

The mobility of population occurs because the gap between rural and urban developments. It forces rural workforces to consider the strength and weakness of the origin and the destination before they mobilize to the urban. Research focuses on two aspects: (1) the reasons why migrants mobilize and activate themselves at informal sector and (2) the governance for informal sector. Result of research indicates that (1) migrants mobilize to Gempol Village because of economic difficulty, especially when job and business opportunities are lacking in the origin. Successful migrants in urban may trigger chain migration because new comers believe that their predecessor will help them. The advance of transportation and communication also stimulates this migration. However, due to lacking of human resource capacity, these new migrants are only absorbed into informal sector; (2) informal sector is never well governed by related institutions although this sector is functional for migrants and Gempol Village community for subsistence production. The actors of informal sector are often repressively treated by Satpol PP during control operation and their presence is restrained by Local Regulation regardless bureaucratic error that underestimates rural and agricultural developments. The problems related to population mobility and informal sector are not easily resolved because the policy-maker is only examining the downstream problems (in urban) without investigating those in upstream (in rural). Therefore, the mobility of rural population may still continue if development policy still emphasizes on urban rather than rural.

Keywords: Population mobility, Job opportunity, Informal sector