| Description |
The LOI-index measures the Legal Obstacles to the Integration of Immigrants. The goal of the index is to condense information on integration policies and to evaluate the liberality or restrictiveness of legal systems governing the integration of immigrants.
The focus of the index is the legal frameworks governing the integration or settlement of migrants in eight European countries in 1995.
80 different items are included concerning the legal regulation of integration in the countries investigated. These items are aggregated into five main
dimensions: (1) residence; (2) access to the labour market; (3) family reunification; (4) naturalisation; (5) second generation.
Authors used two kinds of indicators: binary ones to measure whether a certain legal rule exists in a country or not, and temporal indicators to measure waiting periods or other relevant time periods. They standardised these time measures on a scale between 0 and 1 by relating them to minimum and maximum standards: the minimum standard in each case, for example for a waiting period, is what we consider to be a reasonable and acceptable period. The maximum standard, in contrast, is the score above which it seems to us any other score will not add further to the restrictiveness of the regulation in question in terms of legal disintegration.
Weights were assigned to the particular items and aggregate constructs. Weights are inevitable when building an index. In this case it was necessary to decide which legal regulations are more and which are less important. The strongest weights were generally assigned to waiting periods to reflect the centrality of the principle of consolidation of residence.
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