Bali deported 342 foreigners in the first six months of 2026 alone, a figure that already sits close to the entire total for 2023. Eighteen business sectors were closed to new foreign investment in the same window. A Canggu running club was shut down and its two Dutch organisers permanently banned after screenshots showed Indonesian applicants being rejected while foreign ones were waved through. None of this happened quietly, and none of it happened by accident.
What has followed is a wave of anger, grief and disbelief among foreign residents and investors that has now reached international headlines, most of it filtered through screenshots and half explained clips. This is not a distant story for Fullers. Conversations with developers, sellers and buyers are the ordinary substance of buyer-side advisory work, and the sentiment described below is what surfaces constantly in those conversations, set here alongside local reaction and official statements to see what is actually driving it, what the enforcement is actually targeting, and what would genuinely change the temperature. The anger many foreign residents feel is real, and so is the reasoning behind an enforcement drive that a good part of Bali actively supports, and what follows sets both against each other rather than choosing between them. Readers can weigh the whole picture instead of whichever half of it reaches them first.
What the Anger Actually Sounds Like
One developer, in Bali for the better part of a decade and drawn from a European real estate background, arrived expecting the same rules to apply. They did not. “It took multiple projects and villas to understand how things actually work here,” he said, “but the last eighteen months changed the picture again from a legal standpoint.” He is candid that some of the reaction is opportunism dressed as advocacy: agencies and consultants, in his words, used the regulatory changes “to profit and spread panic.” He also believes the gold rush era, self declared developers operating without capital or real knowledge, is genuinely over, and that this is not entirely a bad thing.
Underneath the regulatory frustration sits something harder to legislate away. Both developers, independently, raised the absence of any real path to belonging. In Australia, the United States, Hong Kong or Singapore, years of tax paid and capital contributed can lead to permanent status. Indonesia offers no real equivalent. “You will always be a bule,” one developer said, using the informal Indonesian word for foreigner. “No matter how much you invest, integrate or contribute, you are reminded that your status is temporary.” He is careful to separate this from an accusation of state racism and to frame it instead as a structural gap: contribution here does not convert into security, in the way it eventually does elsewhere.
That sense of precarity is sharpened by specific experience. One development team described a demand from a local body for what was initially framed as a customary community contribution: a quantity of rice running into several tonnes. When that proved impractical, the request shifted to cash, with the threat of visa complications raised if it went unpaid. Nearly a year of negotiation through a local lawyer produced no resolution. Separately, one developer described being defrauded by a local agent handling building permits, alongside well over a dozen other foreign clients by his account. A police report, private investigators and a court filing followed. Nothing came of it, and the agent is understood to still be operating.
Other accounts circulating among foreign residents are harder to stand up. One developer relayed, secondhand and impossible for Fullers to verify, an allegation that a local village leader had misused communal funds for personal purchases. Whether or not that specific claim holds, the fact that stories like it circulate at all says something real about how little trust exists in the mechanisms meant to hold local authority accountable, a mirror of the trust Indonesia is trying to rebuild in foreign compliance.
The complaint raised most consistently is not that enforcement exists. It is that it runs one way. A foreign national can now be reported to immigration over WhatsApp with little evidentiary threshold, and action can follow within days. A foreigner attempting to report a local contractor or agent faces a slower path: a police report, a filed case, and in more than one account, no resolution at all.
What the Enforcement Is Actually Aimed At
Neither developer disputes the legitimacy of what the government is trying to fix. “I think every investor should know and understand the rules that apply before investing in any country,” one said. “The problem is not that they changed the requirements, it’s how fast it was done and how it was communicated.” That distinction, between the substance of a reform and the execution of it, is where most of the informed foreign commentary on the ground actually sits, whatever the loudest posts online suggest.
The government’s own rationale is more specific than the online reaction to it, and it came directly from the province’s governor rather than a spokesperson responding to a scandal. Wayan Koster said the closures followed a review that found some foreign-owned companies exploiting simplified, low-risk licensing categories, businesses that require little more than a basic registration number, to enter sectors traditionally run by local small enterprises, in some cases through virtual offices with no genuine operating presence. That, he said, threatened to put significant pressure on local businesses, particularly MSMEs. The eighteen closed sectors, spanning small hotels, real estate, consulting, retail, food and beverage, and vehicle rental among others, are precisely those categories. Existing licensed businesses were not affected, and Koster has said the province remains open to investment that is high-quality and responsible, provided it fits Bali’s development vision, respects local values and strengthens the SME economy.
The running club case followed a similar logic, if a messier one. After Indonesian applicants said they were rejected from Entourage Bali’s WhatsApp group while foreign numbers were approved, the club apologised, calling it an error in its automated process, and noted Indonesians made up a meaningful share of one recent event’s ticket holders. Immigration was unmoved. Director General Hendarsam Marantoko described it as a small example of “a state within a state” operating on Indonesian soil, and barred the two organisers from re-entry.
Local reaction has been less monolithic than either side of the foreign debate assumes. Niluh Djelantik, a Bali senator who raised the Entourage case directly with immigration, said publicly that the island’s hospitality “should never be mistaken for a licence to disrespect.” That view was widely echoed online: the closures and the ban were framed less as anti-foreigner sentiment than as protection for local dignity and local enterprise. But it was not unanimous. A visible minority of Indonesian commentary pushed back just as hard the other way, warning that turning one bad case into a blanket “anti-bule” narrative would damage the tourism economy Bali still depends on. Both instincts, protect what is ours and do not scare off what sustains us, are running in the same conversation.
A Fix That Isn’t a Complaint
Buried in the frustration is a proposal that has nothing to do with grievance and everything to do with construction compliance. One Bali-based developer and investment adviser put it plainly: close the retroactive path that currently allows a building without a valid PBG, the building approval required before construction begins, to still obtain an SLF, the certificate confirming a finished building is safe to occupy, once it exists. Announce the closure with a fixed transition window, then hold the line. Buildings without a prior PBG would never be legalised after the fact.
It is a narrow, technical fix, and that is exactly its appeal. It does not touch foreign ownership. It targets the uncontrolled construction that most damages Bali’s spatial planning and its credibility with regulators, while leaving the door open for anyone building properly, foreign or local, to keep doing exactly that.
Two Truths, Not One
The honest position is not that foreigners are being wronged, and it is not that the anger is overblown. Both are happening. A club that shut out Indonesians on Indonesian soil deserved exactly what it got. A construction sector that let unlicensed building slide for years is overdue a correction. At the same time, a foreign developer who employs locally, pays BPJS and settles his tax bill honestly is not the problem this enforcement was built for, and he is currently absorbing the same suspicion as the operators who are.
Bali does not need less enforcement. It needs enforcement, and the coverage of it, that can tell the difference. What still has no clear answer, from government, from media, or from the foreign community itself, is what becomes of the people who were never the problem to begin with.
