Immigration Officials Have Used Google Translate While Vetting Refugees

An internal manual created by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services encourages staffers to use services like Google translate to vet refugees’ social-media profiles, even though Google itself has warned that the tool is not “intended to replace human translators,” according to ProPublica. The manual tells officers that when examining refugees’ non-English social media posts, “the most efficient approach to translate foreign language contents is to utilize one of the many free online language translation services provided by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.”

Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature at Indiana University at Bloomington, said it was “naive on the part of government officials to do that,” and the professor found it “deeply disheartening and stupid and shortsighted, personally.” USCIS has stated that “information collected from social media, by itself, will not be a basis to deny refugee resettlement.”