GCI Explained: Why Indonesia’s New Policy May Not Bring Talent Home
Is Indonesia’s new Global Citizen scheme really about brain gain? Or just a path for elite kids to park passports, property, and privilege?
Indonesia has unveiled its latest policy: the Global Citizen of Indonesia (GCI). Before anyone salutes the flag or dramatically renounces their Australian Medicare card, a reminder: this is not citizenship. It only sounds like citizenship.
GCI answers a question everyone quietly understood. How do we let Indonesians with foreign passports come back without actually reopening the whole messy debate about dual nationality. The solution is permanent residency with a patriotic bow tied around it. Ex citizens, diaspora children, grandchildren, and mixed marriage families now have a path to stay indefinitely. Just don’t ask for political rights.
But the big mystery remains. Is this genuine brain gain or something more hesitant. GCI feels less like a warm embrace and more like the state muttering that you can drop by sometime and maybe bring cash.
Brain Gain or Brain Drain Catch-and-Release?
Officially, GCI is Indonesia’s flagship policy to reverse decades of brain drain. The idea is simple: offer former citizens and their offspring an easy way to return, and watch the talent pour back in. But there’s one small issue. Most of the brains already left. And they didn’t just leave the country. They left the system, the bureaucracy, the salary scales, the social contracts, and in many cases, the belief that coming back would be anything other than a generous experiment in self-sabotage.
Instead of fixing the reasons Indonesians left in the first place, it tells them, “You can stay longer now.” No roadmap for reintegration, no institutional change, no big swing at talent retention. Just a visa with better branding.
People didn’t emigrate because they disliked sambal. They left for places where pushing back on a boss isn’t a cultural sin, where paychecks don’t fluctuate based on political tweets, and where “public transport” doesn’t mean praying a GoJek driver accepts your ride in the rain.
So yes, GCI might cut the red tape at immigration. But unless that’s where the majority of returnees were getting stuck, it’s solving the wrong problem. The real bottleneck is professional. It’s economic. It’s cultural. You can call someone back home, but if the job pays in rupiah and demands they sit silently in meetings while their less qualified superior lectures them on “attitude,” that’s not going to work.
GCI isn’t wrong in concept. It’s just not aimed at the root of the issue. It’s brain drain’s apology card, not its cure.
Welcome to the Working World: Please Lower Your Expectations
Let’s imagine GCI does its job. It lures back a high-performing Indonesian professional who’s been building machine learning pipelines for a fintech in London. He comes back, buoyed by a sense of duty, nostalgia, and maybe an Instagram reel about Indonesian street food. His LinkedIn still smells faintly of global relevance.
And then the onboarding begins.
In his new Jakarta office, the first thing he’s handed is a printed welcome banner. The second is a list of “approved fonts” for PowerPoint. His new manager is the CEO’s nephew, who proudly explains that he doesn’t use email, “because WhatsApp is faster.”
By the end of week one, the returnee realises that innovation is encouraged, as long as it doesn’t challenge anything important. Like processes. Or management.
Despite their qualifications, returnees are often placed in awkward mid-level roles where they’re expected to deliver results but avoid offending older colleagues. They’re told to:
Speak up… but politely.
Challenge ideas… but not the wrong ones.
Contribute… but never outshine.
The pay? A polite fraction of what they made abroad. Sometimes literally less than the guy who never left but has seniority.
What follows is usually a slow unraveling. Burnout comes not from the workload but the constant pressure to adjust downward. In skills, expectations, and sometimes self-worth.
Within 12 to 24 months, many of them quietly disappear back to Singapore, Sydney or wherever their last job was.
Elite Kids and Real Estate: GCI’s Actual Target Market
For all the talk of reversing brain drain and empowering the diaspora, there is one group that GCI was seemingly tailor-made for: the foreign-passport-holding children of Indonesia’s elite. These are not your average returnees trying to teach or build social enterprises in Yogyakarta. These are the heirs of business dynasties, the second-generation globe-trotters whose childhood memories include Singapore’s Orchard Road, Swiss boarding schools, and that one family wedding in Bali where the entire guest list arrived by private jet.
Once they gave up their Indonesian passports for a more practical one, they started hitting snags.
The family land in Canggu was getting trickier to manage legally.
Staying longer than 60 days meant visa runs.
It was becoming harder to justify running parts of the family conglomerate from abroad without any real residence rights.
Enter GCI. It doesn’t give them voting power or a red passport, but it does give them what matters: a clean, long-term way to live, work, and invest in Indonesia without messing with their international mobility. No more shady nominee structures or overstays politely overlooked by airport officials. Now they can have their passport cake and eat it too.
The word “diaspora” in the press release sounds egalitarian. But the subtext reads: “For the child of a former minister now living in Sydney who wants to buy a 30-year leasehold on a Seminyak villa and not deal with the fuss.”
And if the government picks up a little capital inflow, who’s complaining? Just don’t confuse this for a talent strategy. GCI is not about attracting intellect. It’s about retaining assets quietly.
Bureaucratic Flexibility Meets Cultural Rigidity
On paper, GCI is digital, and centralised. You can apply online, skip the in-person drama, get an unlimited stay permit with multiple re-entries. It’s everything a returnee wants, until they actually start living and working here.
GCI may have upgraded the entry process, it hasn’t touched the environment you’re entering. The problem isn’t the door. It’s what’s behind it.
The Indonesian workplace, for all its warmth and communal rhythm, still runs on rules that don’t make it into HR manuals. It is deeply hierarchical, built around status, deference, and a sense that questioning seniority is just slightly impolite, if not borderline treasonous.
And then there’s the money. Salaries follow strict pecking orders. If you expect to be paid what you’re worth internationally, someone will remind you that it might create “disharmony.” Translation: the boss is not ready for that kind of ego check.
Even the smallest change can feel like dragging furniture through wet cement. Try to streamline a process or suggest accountability, and you’ll quickly be invited to “sabar, ya.” That phrase often signals that your ideas are now in an indefinite holding pattern. And if you keep pushing? Brace for the cultural body-check: “Sok bule banget, sih.” A polite way of saying, “This isn’t the West. Dial it back.”
GCI might give you unlimited stay. But don’t confuse that with unlimited impact. The system isn’t designed to bend easily. It rewards patience, not disruption. You’re free to be here. Just not necessarily to change much.
GCI is, by most accounts, a decent policy. In a system not exactly known for efficiency or progressive immigration reform, it’s refreshingly coherent. For ex-Indonesians, children of mixed marriages, and scattered diaspora, GCI finally offers some predictability. It brings structure to a process long built on guesswork, favour, and expired visa extensions.
But despite its efficiency and practical benefits, GCI is not the elaborate return invitation it wants to be. It speaks the language of inclusion, but only within limits. It doesn’t offer better jobs, smoother reintegration, or real space in the national imagination for the professional identities returnees have built abroad. It fixes the logistics, but skips the psychology, the economics, and the hard questions about whether the system itself is ready to absorb people who work differently, think independently, and expect to be paid accordingly.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we work with leadership teams to build adaptive organisations that understand what returnees bring. Contact us to rewire internal culture, making space for high-skill Indonesian returnees to thrive.