New York Migrant Surge Sparks Need for Legal Interpreters

Thousands of migrants and asylum seekers from West Africa, Latin America, and China enter New York City every week, speaking a variety of languages from West African Wolof to indigenous Ecuadorian Kichwa to Chinese Min Nan.

Fears of discrimination lead many migrants to say they speak a more common language to ensure they get connected to a translator. A severe shortage of translators fluent in less common languages combined with a lapse in municipal funding for translation programs means migrants in New York are experiencing severe difficulties in getting proper legal services both in and out of the courtroom.

“There tends to be sort of a general misunderstanding of the idea that if you come from a certain place, you speak a certain language, like people from Central and South America speaking Spanish,” said Camille Mackler, founder and executive director of Immigrant ARC.

Translators help people who speak limited or no English work their way through every step of the legal process. They help migrants communicate with lawyers about their legal situation. They help with important paperwork like asylum applications. They assist when migrants testify in court proceedings.

In 2023, the city ponied up $5 million to fund interpretation services, but it’s opted not to renew that funding as agencies across the city slash budgets. New York is facing “significant fiscal challenges,” Mayor Eric Adams (D) said in November, pointing out that the city has spent $1.45 billion on the migrant crisis and is expected to spend nearly $11 billion in 2024 and 2025 with no help from the federal government in sight.

The lack of funding for language services has outraged advocates who say it will penalize migrants with asylum status but also thousands with pending applications who need interpreters.

“Just testing people and getting them trained is extremely costly,” said Maimouna Dieye, who leads African Communities Together’s community interpreter program.

ACT and other organizations, including Masa and the Asian American Federation, have set up co-ops to provide translation services for people from Western Africa, Latin America, and Asia, with the goal of figuring out what the language needs are and training new interpreters who can bring cultural competency to the work.

“That’s really important work. Step one is assessing what is out there,” said Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian American Federation. “That’s what we did for year one, but if there’s no year-two funding, where does that leave us?”

Phone-Based Interpreters

More than 150,000 migrants and asylum seekers have come into the city since spring of 2022, Adams said in a Dec. 9 radio appearance, after a decade of declining international migration. Those migrants need help filling out paperwork, especially asylum applications that will eventually help them get work authorizations.

The city often relies on providing phone-based interpretation services, provided by LanguageLine Solutions, which is less desirable than in-person translation where all parties can see who they’re talking to, said Dieye.

Many lawyers, according to Dieye, use the phone interpretation service for in-office legal assistance.

The New York court system also provides interpretation services through LanguageLine. Still, African Communities Together knows of and has worked with lawyers who had to bring their own interpreters to hearings because the court didn’t have an interpreter for a particular language.

The language phone lines don’t necessarily have enough interpreters to meet the needs of the West African or indigenous speaker populations, said Melissa Chua, co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at New York Legal Assistance Group.

African Communities Together receives interpretation requests for people from Senegal who speak French and Wolof, from Mauritania who speak Wolof, Pulaar, Hassaniya, and Arabic, and from Guinea where Fulani is spoken. There are also migrants from central African countries that speak Arabic, French, or Sango, the primary language of the Central African Republic.

Picking a Language

The language needs aren’t always clear-cut, as common languages like French can have vast differences in dialect between countries. And even if an interpreter for a given language is available, some migrants—especially those that speak indigenous Latin American languages—opt to request other languages due to fears of discrimination.

Dieye said some Wolof speakers think it’s easier to ask for a French interpreter because they think no one will know what Wolof is. Wolof is the most widely spoken language in Senegal, but French is the official language, and it’s common for those who speak Wolof as their primary language to also know French.

At some point, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers will have to go to court where they’ll have to provide testimony and supporting evidence, said Chua.

It’s “super important” that there’s clear communication, Chua said. “That’s why we’re advocating for long-term investment,” she added.

Cultural Competency

The court’s rules don’t always account for the nuance and complexities involved with translation, particularly of legal terminology.

The goal of the court is for interpreters to essentially be invisible, and they’re not allowed to interject much during proceedings, said Daniel Kaufman, founding co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. That can work when translating from Spanish or Mandarin to English, but interpreting from an indigenous Latin American language, for example, might mean there are technical legal terms that aren’t appropriate or don’t easily translate and need more explanation.

“There’s no way to interpret them in single or conventionalized word. So there has to be more back and forth in these cases than there is in standard cases,” Kaufman said. “There’s friction around that.”

For example, alimony is a term that’s common in American culture but is not easily understood in Bengali, said Diya Basu-Sen, executive director of Sapna NYC, which helps South Asian immigrant women get access to health care and social services.

“One of the challenges is also translating into words that your community understands. So often even when translations are done into Bangla, the translations are academic or use high-flown language which is hard to understand for immigrants who don’t know how to read or write Bangla or have a fourth-grade education,” Basu-Sen said.

Government and court officials often will try to speed things along in a more widely-spoken language like English or Spanish. Latin American migrants who speak indigenous languages are particularly affected, as they often try to get by in Spanish since they’ve had some exposure to it, according to Kaufman.

‘Long-Term Investment’

The ultimate goal for the co-ops is to have interpreters officially certified in their respective languages for legal, health care, and other translation services, said Robert Agyemang, vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition.

The lack of interpretation services creates a vicious cycle, Kaufman said. Migrants often aren’t told they have the right to an interpreter in legal situations, so they don’t know to ask for one. Interpreters then don’t have enough work to make it a full-time job, and there aren’t as many who are readily available when it’s needed.

“The real roadblock is on the organizational side, just finding a way to allow these interpreters to really dedicate themselves to it, instead of just doing it a few hours here and a few hours there, whenever somebody calls for a job,” Kaufman said.

According to Dieye, having migrants work with someone they can identify with is one of the important services a community-based co-op can provide. With additional funding, the co-ops could train legal interpreters and help them build their legal and court vocabulary so they can get certified as official court interpreters.

“They will be providing mostly in-person interpretation so a person is there seeing a member of their community, someone who looks like them,” Dieye said.