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	Migrant Integration Index	Transnationalism Survey Measurement
Field	Migration Studies	Migration Studies
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2018	2003
Originator	Niklas Harder, Lucila Figueroa, Rachel M. Gillum, Dominik Hangartner, David D. Laitin & Jens Hainmueller	Alejandro Portes; Luis Eduardo Guarnizo & Patricia Landolt
Type	Latent multidimensional survey scale of individual integration	Survey-measurement pipeline for cross-border activity
Seminal source	Harder, N., Figueroa, L., Gillum, R. M., Hangartner, D., Laitin, D. D., & Hainmueller, J. (2018). Multidimensional Measure of Immigrant Integration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(45), 11483-11488.	Portes, A. (2003). Conclusion: Theoretical Convergencies and Empirical Evidence in the Study of Immigrant Transnationalism. International Migration Review, 37(3), 874-892.
Aliases	IPL Integration Index, IPL-12 Integration Measure, Individual Immigrant Integration Scale, Multidimensional Integration Survey Index	Transnational Activities Survey, CIEP-Style Transnationalism Measurement, Cross-Border Activity Measurement, Immigrant Transnationalism Typology
Related	3	3
Summary	The migrant integration index developed by Harder, Hainmueller, Laitin and colleagues in 2018 is a short, validated survey instrument that measures how integrated an individual immigrant is across six distinct dimensions: psychological, economic, political, social, linguistic, and navigational. Earlier integration research suffered from a proliferation of ad hoc, single-dimension proxies — employment alone, or language alone — that were not comparable across studies, groups, or countries. The IPL index, named for Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, instead defines integration as inherently multidimensional and provides standardized batteries — a twelve-item short form (IPL-12) and a twenty-four-item long form (IPL-24) — that aggregate the six dimensions into a single, comparable score for each person. Critically, the instrument is designed and validated psychometrically, with the short form shown to track the long form and external outcomes closely, so researchers can capture the full breadth of integration in just a few minutes of survey time. The result is a portable, individual-level measurement tool that brings consistency to a field long fragmented by incommensurable indicators.	Transnationalism survey measurement is the set of techniques for turning the slippery idea of immigrant transnationalism — living life across borders — into countable survey data. Alejandro Portes and his collaborators, working through the Comparative Immigrant Entrepreneurship Project (CIEP) and related studies, argued that transnationalism should be reserved for activities that require regular, sustained cross-border involvement, not the occasional phone call or holiday visit that virtually every immigrant makes. Their 1999 programmatic statement with Guarnizo and Landolt laid out the pitfalls of a concept stretched to cover everything, and Portes's 2003 synthesis distilled the empirical lessons into a measurement strategy. The method asks respondents about specific economic, political, and sociocultural cross-border activities, records how often each is performed, and uses an intensity threshold to separate genuinely transnational individuals from the merely connected. From these items the analyst builds a typology by domain and intensity and then estimates how common transnationalism is and who practices it. The result disciplines a fashionable but vague concept into a measurable, comparable construct.