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Linguistic Refoulement: Indigenous-Language Speakers Seeking Asylum in the United States

Katherine M. Becker

The principle of non-refoulement undergirds international asylum law. Non-refoulement stipulates that states should not return people to places where they will face particular forms of danger. This paper analyzes language as a nexus of refoulement, employing as a case study the experiences of Indigenous-language speakers seeking asylum in the United States.

This paper makes two principal contributions to the study of language and asylum law—one theoretical and one empirical. First, it introduces linguistic refoulement as a theoretical tool for understanding the intersections of language and asylum. Linguistic refoulement refers to situations where a lack of language-access protections cause states to return people to places where they face harm. The paper develops a taxonomy of five related linguistic bordering practices that produce linguistic refoulement: linguistic erasure, linguistic neglect, linguistic subordination, linguistic impatience, and linguistic isolation.

Second, this paper offers empirical evidence suggesting that the United States immigration system contravenes non-refoulement by failing to meet the language-access needs of asylum seekers who speak Mam, K’iche’, Nahuatl, and the hundreds of other Indigenous languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere. By subjecting Indigenous-language speakers seeking asylum to these overlapping linguistic bordering practices, the United States disproportionately refouls them back to situations involving threats, persecution, and torture.

This paper then offers a framework for developing strategies to protect people against linguistic refoulement, arguing that it is only by understanding the varied manifestations of linguistic refoulement that we can meaningfully protect linguistically vulnerable populations. The paper concludes by proposing policy changes, including a special immigrant visa for skilled interpreters and the abolition of immigration detention for linguistically vulnerable populations.

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Inclusive Responses to Language Violence

Panel Chair: Edith Muleiro

How can translators, interpreters, and language activists develop sustainable models to meet the needs of people who need language services, especially in humanitarian and crisis contexts?

How can the profession include people who don’t have access to higher education, certification, and traditional paths of professional development?

What degree of exclusivity is appropriate in a discipline whose raison d’être is linguistic inclusion?

Although at least 4.5 billion people around the world speak two or more languages, the Translators Association of China estimates that only 640,000 of them work as translators. Translation is one of the fastest-growing industries. Yet many people who would make phenomenal translators and interpreters face administrative, educational, and resource barriers which bar them from doing so.

At the same time, for many refugees, asylum seekers and other linguistically vulnerable people it can be next to impossible to access appropriate translation services. Even within more common language pairs like Spanish<>English, the lack of recognition of linguistic diversity and comprehensive training often leads to faulty translation. And these risks are especially great for less dominant languages like certain Indigenous and endangered languages.

These administrative barriers combined with a lack of appropriate translation services for linguistically vulnerable people mean that the massive demand for humanitarian translation services goes unmet.

And the stakes are life and death.

Drawing on their research and professional experiences, the panelists will consider the state of humanitarian translation in several contexts, including Argentina, Spain, and the United States. They will reflect on language violence and exclusion in each of these contexts, highlighting the devastating consequences of that exclusion. Without language services, people cannot access resources, information, and life-saving protections.

Panelists will then discuss frameworks for developing inclusive responses to that violence, considering how pro bono interpretation, alternative paths to certification, and community-led solutions can help meet the need for interpreters and translators. Participants will highlight the importance of quality control and training and discuss how to balance those concerns with the need for maximum inclusion. Finally, participants will reflect on their own initiatives to equip more translators outside of traditional pathways and share lessons learned in those contexts.

Panelists

Edith Muleiro is the Social Services Coordinator at Kifkif, a non-profit organization that promotes the rights of migrant and refugee LGBTI+ people in Spain. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and is studying forced migration at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her undergraduate thesis investigated systemic issues with access to interpreters in immigration courts in the United States. She has experience interpreting between English, Spanish, and Arabic.

Romina Galloso Sabat is the Spanish Team Lead at Respond Crisis Translation. Respond is a collective of language activists providing compassionate, effective, and trauma-informed interpretation and translation services for migrants, refugees, and anyone experiencing language barriers. Romina focuses on language quality management, as well as in the design, development, and implementation of education and training programs for translators and interpreters. She is studying translation and interpretation at the Universidad de Belgrano in Argentina. She was the recipient of the 2021 Pro Bono Week Award for the American Bar Association Commission on Immigration, in recognition of the language services she provided to the South Texas Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR).

Katie Becker has worked for several years in pro bono immigrant legal services in North Carolina. At the University of North Carolina School of Law, she trained and managed a team of volunteer interpreters who assisted clients and student-attorneys with asylum cases. She has a bachelor’s degree from Duke University and a master’s from Queen’s University Belfast. She was the recipient of the Hillary Rodham Clinton Award for Peace and Reconciliation from Queen’s University Belfast. Her research focuses on linguistic violence against Indigenous-language speakers seeking asylum in the United States.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160811-the-amazing-benefits-of-being-bilingual
[2] https://www.translatemedia.com/careers/how-to-become-a-translator/the-translation-industry/ 
[3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/interpreters-and-translators.htm

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Literacy, digital literacy, and extreme linguistic vulnerability: Barriers and solutions to access to language justice

Katie Becker

Panel: Inclusive Responses to Language Violence

Katie Becker will present findings from her research about speakers of Indigenous languages in the U.S. immigration system and her work with non-dominant language speakers in the U.S. legal system. In these contexts, the median person seeking interpreting and translating assistance is often assumed to be a Spanish speaker, highly literate, and able to use a computer with ease.

But this is not the case. Many people speak other languages than Spanish–including Indigenous languages and other languages of limited diffusion. One in five American adults is “functionally illiterate.” The digital divide in the United States hits non-English speakers especially hard: only 12% of foreign-born people demonstrate a high level of proficiency with computers and digital tools, and many households simply do not have access to the internet. Each of these factors overlap to create barriers that seem insurmountable.

In this presentation, Katie will explore how these barriers overlap to prevent the most vulnerable from accessing justice in the civil and immigration contexts. Katie will consider how much of the U.S. language-access infrastructure is focused on meeting the needs of Spanish speakers–an important effort, but one that neglects people occupying positions of even more extreme linguistic vulnerability. And many of the proposed access-to-justice solutions like technologized court forms, apps, and machine translation simply will not work for people who cannot read them, who lack access to computers, or who are uncomfortable using technology. She will consider how translators, interpreters, and multilingual navigators can help bridge these language, literacy, and digital-literacy gaps to help people access justice.

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Opening up the profession: Harnessing the power of volunteers in language crises

Romina Galloso Sabat

Inclusive Responses to Language Violence

Chair: Edith Muleiro

Romina Galloso Sabat leads Spanish translation for Respond Crisis Translation, a collective of 2,500 multilingual people interpreting and translating in 108 languages. She is also a student of translation in Argentina. In this presentation, she will compare these two experiences: as a leader in a collective of largely volunteer translators and interpreters and as a student of translation. She will consider the barriers faced by aspiring translators in the Argentinian context, where only certified and highly educated translators are permitted to lend their services in the legal system. This context serves as a parallel example to the other panelists’ work in the US, highlighting the various ways in which access is limited for both interpreters and those who use their services. The continued focus on the experience of interpreters within these spaces serves to illuminate the various inequities of the judicial systems and social services for all involved.

She will close by offering lessons learned from her leadership in Respond, focusing on strategies for liberalizing access to the translation profession and democratizing access to translation itself.

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Lost in Translation: Interpretation as a barrier to asylum in Immigration Courts

Edith Muleiro

Panel: Inclusive Responses to Language Violence

Chair: Edith Muleiro

The first presentation focuses on research surrounding interpretation in U.S. Immigration Courts and social services, with a comparative lens based on the panelist’s work in Spain. For asylum seekers worldwide, lack of language access is particularly problematic because the inability to convey their stories may be the difference between life and death. 

In the US, this research was carried out in Texas. Immigrants who speak a language other than English struggle to access quality interpretation and translation in US courtrooms due to a variety of linguistic, social, and cultural challenges. To learn more about this language polemic, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 professionals who work in social service and judicial systems related to immigration courts in Texas. 

Findings indicated that the largest gaps and challenges pertain to interpreter training, reporting pathways, working conditions, telephonic interpretation, translation of documents, and interpretation for detained respondents. Policy implications include suggested changes to the current interpretation system which integrate language justice principles. 

These findings will be compared to observations of interpretation practices within social services in Spain, based on Edith Muleiro’s role as a social service coordinator at a non-profit that works with LGBTI+ migrants. This comparison seeks to highlight the similarities within the systems that asylum seekers travel through worldwide.