Voluntary associations have long been held in distrust in France, but things have changed recently. Associations are now said to develop tolerance, civic and democratic virtues, political sophistication and so on. Nevertheless, few studies focus on the interactions that actually take place in the associational context in order to demonstrate these relations. In this essay we focus on voluntary associations of migrants and we ask whether they are schools of democracy and places of politicization. We then study individual careers in order to identify the consequences of such a context for individuals. We work on three voluntary associations of young people mainly from North Africa, dealing with social action and leisure.