Volunteering for Legal Status. Putting Asylum System Interpreters to Work in the Non-profit Sector

Abstract

This article examines the manufacture of consent around the unpaid employment in the asylum-seeking population, based on an ethnographic survey of volunteer interpreters in a non-profit organisation that supports asylum seekers. While non-profit actors seek the support and loyalty of interpreters through the implementation of a selective and preferential recruitment process, the latter find in this privileged relationship the ad hoc protection necessary for their financial and administrative survival. Exiles’ volunteer work may be motivated by financial compensation, but also — in the case of those whose applications for refugee status have been refused — the promise of one day obtaining regularisation of their status. This article shows the ways in which non-profit organisations act as the guarantors of exiles’ “good conduct” in processes to obtain regularisation, by producing certificates of volunteer work, while at the same time participating in their recruitment, screening and selecting the individuals likely to be the most employable on the labour market in the future.