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usinessmen grouped under the Indonesian Employers' Association (Apindo) have complained the current bylaw limiting the number of newcomers in Batam Island has made it difficult to get workers, urging the local administration to review the regulation.

Apindo's Riau Islands provincial chairman Abidin argued the review of the 2001 bylaw was needed since businesses on the island currently needed as many as 36,000 new workers to meet their investment plan.

"Legally, the bylaw also violates human rights. Batam residents are not banned from entering other areas in the country, we want to know why the local administration has applied a discriminative regulation," Abidin told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the association meeting in Batam on Thursday.

He said the administration applied complicated requirements for newcomers, such as a money guarantee, to halt them coming to the industrialized island. "Such a requirement would burden unemployed people."

He said Apindo was considering filing a judicial review of the bylaw.

"But we hope that through discussion the administration could review the bylaw. We have also sent a letter to the Home Ministry asking them to warn the Batam administration against applying the bylaw," he added.

Abidin said the administration had no reason to fear that newcomers would raise the crime rate in the city. "The ratio of residents to police officers is ideal here. So there's no need to worry."

Earlier, Batam Mayor Ahmad Dahlan argued the bylaw was designed to help control the city's population, saying that the city -the land and facilities - was only designed to accommodate one million residents.

"Clean water reservoirs here are designed to accommodate only 1 million people. So we need regulation to limit the number of residents," he said.