ABSTRACT
The life trajectories of migrant populations and mobile citizens are dependent upon their opportunities of accessing a number of services which are key for transnational survival, including, among others, advice on legality and settlement issues, assistance for job search, health provision or entry into professional (re)training programs. In all these cases, migrant accessibility hinges upon the mobilization of “appropriate” linguistic and communicative resources. Some services, as for example, housing, education, employment, or welfare, may not be migrant specific, but rather, aimed at the general population; in that case, as Roberts (2013: 82) points out, “for the great majority of migrants establishing their legitimacy is only the entry point in the more general societal competition for scarce resources.” The institutional challenge becomes how to serve all service users in ways that ensure rationality of decision, fairness, and equality. For a long time, the concern of sociolinguists and interaction analysts (Gumperz and Roberts 1991; Campbell and Roberts 2007) has been precisely to show the multiple ways in which discrimination and inequality is built into the strict gatekeeping mechanisms that regulate entry into institutions and access to the resources distributed therein. More recently, the focus has shifted towards the scrutinization of service provision in migrant-specific institutional spaces. A fair amount of studies have examined citizenship procedures (Codó 2008; Gómez Díez 2010; Jacquemet 2011; Maryns 2013), though not exclusively (see e.g., the work of Sabaté i Dalmau 2014, on migrant-owned, migrant-oriented telecommunication shops in Barcelona; Allan 2013, on professional language programs in Canada; or Kirilova 2013, on job interviews for newcomers to Denmark who experience difficulties entering the labor market). This chapter focuses on the second type of services, that is, those constituted by the migrant experience, and it adopts a general perspective on them linked to the analysis of language ideologies and practices. This has two consequences. 559First, it does not focus exclusively on language services, that is, on the institutional provision of translation, mediation, or interpreting in migrant languages, but on how these services (or lack thereof) shape access to resources key for survival such as residence visas, shelter, or technology. Second, it reaches beyond the examination of language-focused services, such as local language training schemes, and into various other types of key institutional contexts.
