Migration in Rawls’s political philosophy is notable primarily because of its absence. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, issues of migration became prominent, both in political practice and in activist response to that practice. Rawls’s work, however, contains very few explicit discussions of the issue of migration. Nevertheless, Rawls’s work has been enormously influential in analyses of the justice of immigration, and an account of justice in immigration can also be found in some scattered remarks in Rawls’s The Law of Peoples.

Rawls’s domestic political philosophy assumes that migration does not exist; he assumes that an individual enters society at birth, and exits only at death (TJ 152; PL 12, 40). Rawls is, here, making a simplifying assumption, one that is justiied with reference to his focus on justice in the basic structure of a particular society; he is not making the statement that migration in fact does not exist, nor that it does not stand in need of analysis from the standpoint of justice. Nevertheless, this is a striking assumption. Throughout his domestic work on political justice, he consistently ignores the issue of migration – with one small exception, when he argues that a just political community cannot prohibit emigration (PL 277). The issue of immigration, however, is ignored entirely.