Money for immigrant language access makes it into $112.4 billion city budget; orgs ‘relieved’
In continuing efforts to process arrivals of asylum seekers and migrants, local immigration groups are pushing for more language access services and a central interpreter bank in New York City’s $112.4 billion fiscal year 2025 budget. They were overjoyed to see funding for language services restored, despite the city’s recent failures to keep up with local language access law.
Although President Biden’s action plan temporarily shut down the southern border this June, asylum seekers are still arriving in New York City. According to city numbers, more than 205,000 asylum seekers have arrived since the spring of 2022, with more than 65,000 still in the city’s care.
One of the main issues among West African migrants from countries like Senegal and Guinea is that some speak lesser-known dialects of various African languages, said Aminata Chabi-Leke, a founding member of AfriLingual, a worker cooperative for native Africans.
“Sometimes they will say they speak a specific language and once you start the assignment, you figure out it’s not actually the correct language,” Chabi-Leke said. “They’ll tell you ‘I speak Fulani,’ but it’s not the Fulani from Guinea; it’s from Mauritania.”
In most instances, a fellow native speaker of any kind makes a person immediately feel comfortable and confident, said Chabi-Leke, but some people remain nervous about communicating and sharing personal information, making it necessary to get training in legal interpretation, business practices, and trauma-informed interpretation for survivors—especially for asylum seekers dealing with navigating a new country’s infrastructure.
“Language access is not a luxury anymore,” Chabi-Leke said. “I feel personally that language access is a human right, because everybody should be able to say what they want to say in the language that makes them feel most comfortable. That’s how they can convey, to the best of their ability, the message.”
According to data from the city’s Language Access Secret Shopper (LASS) program, more than half of the city’s 148 service centers were in violation of Local Law 30, the city’s local language access law. The shopper program found that only four service centers had both translated signage and documents on-site for those newly arrived. At other service centers, people were uninformed about their right to interpretation services; did not make use of telephonic interpretation services through the language line, instead relying on tools like Google Translate; and were frequently denied interpretation.
ACT Executive Director Amaha Kassa said city agencies need more bilingual staff, more cultural training, and better enforcement of the language law to improve the situation for both newly arrived and established migrants and asylum seekers when it comes to looking for work, housing, and healthcare.
“People are seeking vital services—certainly new arrivals over the last couple of years, but also long-term New Yorkers who are limited English-proficient and seeking services—and they expect that those services will be accessible in their language,” Kassa said. “That’s what the city advertises and tells people. That’s what the law says. And often they’re not able to access those services.”
Francis Madi Cerrada, a staff person at New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), said her family members have experienced language barriers for decades. Her family migrated to the city from Venezuela about 20 years ago, when she was a teenager, but her mother still speaks limited English. “A lot of the infrastructure we have today, we didn’t have back then, and it just sort of fell on the kids to translate,” said Madi Cerrada. “I had to translate during the parent-teacher meetings [and when] getting things in the mail. Surprisingly, just a few weeks ago, I still had to translate for her in the hospital. She was getting a routine colonoscopy. They got their own interpreter and I sat back, but I also watched the interpreter not always translate what the doctor was saying. It’s an issue even to this day.”
Madi Cerrada said more awareness and resources are definitely available now for immigrant families, but it’s still frustrating for people like her mother. “My mom is in a little better position because she speaks a little more English,” she said. “I know that it’s difficult for folks that arrived recently that don’t know how to access information.”
The Language Justice Collaborative (LJC), which is made up of immigration groups like NYIC, African Communities Together (ACT), the Mexican American Students’ Alliance (MASA), and the Asian American Federation (AAF), received much-needed funding in the 2024 city budget to address these gaps in language services amid the migrant influx. The money went toward language services staffing, training for interpreters, and testing language proficiencies, Kassa said.
Before the city budget passed this week, councilmembers and advocates were reeling over Mayor Eric Adams’s sweeping cuts to beloved programs, especially ones for libraries, cultural institutions, and pre-K and 3k seats for early childhood education. Kassa said immigration groups had heard about $3.8 million in cuts to language access services and wanted that funding restored as well.
Mayor Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams agreed to the budget on time with little spectacle this year, and made many of the requested restorations.
“I want to thank Speaker Adams and our partners in the City Council for joining us in passing a budget that addresses the affordability crisis head-on and that invests in the future of our city and the working-class people who make New York the greatest city in the world,” Mayor Adams said in a statement. “Despite facing unprecedented challenges, including a $7.1 billion budget gap, a $4.9 billion international humanitarian crisis, and hundreds of millions of short-term stimulus dollars used to fund crucial long-term programs, we still passed a collaborative budget that addresses the three things that cost New Yorkers the most: housing, childcare, and healthcare.”
The adopted city budget dedicated $100 million to an early childhood education strategy with $25 million specifically toward child care services for undocumented children, $600 million for equitable education initiatives, more than $22 million for cultural institutions and libraries, $5.4 million for HIV/AIDS related programs, and a robust affordable housing plan.
The LJC applauded the inclusion of several priorities in the budget as well as language access worker cooperatives.
“The final New York City budget for FY25 brought major reversals to Mayor Adams’s unnecessarily austere proposed budget that would have left too many New Yorkers in need,” said NYIC President and CEO Murad Awawdeh. “This budget will give our immigrant neighbors—whether they arrived here 30 days ago or 30 years ago—a better opportunity to fully integrate into their lives as New Yorkers, and will ensure that families can stay together while they contribute to our economy and their children are safe, learning, and cared for. We look forward to building on these investments in the year to come to ensure that everyone who calls New York home can thrive here.”
At least $1 million of the funding will go to a centralized interpreter bank for public-facing spaces, which was proposed by the LJC.
“Right now, City Council offices are providing their own interpretation out of their district budget(s),” Kassa said. “We proposed that this new language bank focus on filling the gaps for offices, like City Council offices, community meetings, clinics. That’s where those funds would go, as well as to contracted city agencies; for example, legal service providers or a [nonprofit or church-based] charity. You’re kind of on your own in figuring out where to find interpretation for clients.”
Kassa said there’s also hope for the funding to be more inclusive of indigenous Latin American languages such as Kakchiquel & Kich’e or Nahuatl; African languages like Wolof, Fulani, Mandingo, Hassaniya, French, and Arabic; Asian languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan Chinese, Bengali, Japanese, and Korean; and Haitian Creole.
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