Migrant Integration Policy Index

MIPEX measures integration policy, not integration itself. It scores how favorable a country's laws and regulations are for immigrant integration across eight domains — labour-market mobility, family reunification, education, health, political participation, permanent residence, access to nationality, and anti-discrimination — by coding each policy against a benchmark of the highest equal-treatment standard. The output is a 0-to-100 composite per country plus eight domain scores. It tells you about the legal and policy environment immigrants face, which is an input to integration, rather than how integrated any individual immigrant has become.

Country experts read the actual national laws and regulations and score each specific policy indicator against predefined benchmarks anchored to equal-treatment standards, usually on a 0/50/100 scale. Indicator scores are averaged into eight domain scores, which are averaged into the overall MIPEX score. Comparability comes from every country being scored against the same fixed benchmarks by trained experts, with documentation and review to align coders. This benchmark-and-aggregate pipeline lets the index rank countries and track changes across editions on a consistent scale.

They measure different things at different levels. MIPEX is a country-level index of the policy environment, built by expert coding of laws against benchmarks. An individual migrant integration index, such as the IPL measure, is a person-level outcome built from immigrants' own survey responses across personal dimensions like language, employment, and belonging. MIPEX captures the inputs governments provide; the individual index captures the outcomes immigrants experience. They are complementary, and researchers often combine them to test whether more favorable policy environments are associated with better individual integration.