In January 2021 the Government made an unprecedented and uncapped offer for Hong Kongers to migrate to the UK: the Hong Kong BN(O) visa. Nearly twenty-five years after sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred from Britain to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this opened up a route to settlement that had been unavailable since the introduction of the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. Offered on humanitarian grounds, the UK Government’s official justifications for this scheme were their escalating foreign policy concerns about political oppression, including breaches of Basic Law, and the imposition of National Security Law by Hong Kong SAR’s Government.
Following its introduction, the visa was upheld by the Conservative administration (2019-2024) as evidence of their ‘fair and generous’ approach to migration, their world-leading track record on human rights, and a flagship of a suite of provisions labelled ‘safe and legal (humanitarian) routes’. The former colonial relationship between Britain and Hong Kong was front and centre in the Government’s justification of the visa and its provisions. It was presented as honouring a historical commitment to the people of the so-called ‘last colony’. By the end of March 2024, 201,877 visas had been granted through the scheme.
Foreign policy concerns may have loomed large in the framing of the scheme, but equally significant was the politicisation of migration that had driven the 2016 Brexit referendum. ‘Taking back control’ of the UK’s borders, the central narrative within the leave campaign, became a central pillar of the Government’s Brexit strategy and its future imaginings for Britain. The precursors to this were found in the decade-long Hostile Environment, a Conservative-led ambition to communicate to the world that the UK was ‘tough on immigration’.
This context laid the foundations for a post-Brexit Britain where the mainstreaming of anti-migrant rhetoric and practice was normalised. The was evident in the enhancement of the powers to the Home Office in respect to immigration enforcement via detention, deportation and citizenship deprivation, as well significant reforms to the immigration and asylum regime. Despite public concern about migration waning in the aftermath of the referendum, the Government continued to pursue an agenda that criminalised asylum seekers, notably those crossing the Channel in small boats. They sought ways to bring in new legislation that curtailed the right to claim asylum and introduced immigration enforcement measures such as the Rwanda Plan that were aimed at deterring people from trying to come to the UK.
The humanitarian support and a route to citizenship for those from Britain’s last colony on the surface appears to run counter to these broader shifts. It stands out in a context where increasing restrictions are the norm. Indeed, the exceptionality of the Hong Kongers is at the heart of the presentation of this visa as ‘bespoke’, unique to them in consequence of the circumstances under which it was offered. Yet, thinking of this visa as a present exception obscures both how it is implicated in ongoing reforms to the UK’s migration and asylum regime and Britain’s colonial relationship to the people of Hong Kong and how this was mediated through immigration and nationality legislation. Thinking with this broader context and history is important for troubling understandings of Hong Kongers as an exception.
The genealogy of immigration controls and nationality legislation reveals that the Hong Kong BN(O) visa is only the latest chapter in the Hong Kongers being presented and considered as exceptional by British Government’s past and present. The Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962 recast Hong Kongers as aliens for the purposes of immigration control at the UK’s borders. This removed the freedom of movement that had been previously permitted due to their status as Citizens of the UK and Colonies—and which they had shared with others from across the British Empire—meaning that they required a work permit to work in Britain. Yet, it was easier for Hong Kongers to get work permits to come and move to the UK than it was, for example, for people from the Caribbean.
With the introduction of the British Nationality Act 1981, Hong Kongers—the largest remaining British colonial population—found themselves reclassified as British Dependent Territories Citizens. Analysis of the parliamentary debates reveals that politicians were unanimous that the Hong Kongers should not be given British citizenship and with it the right to move to and settle in the UK. While citizens of the Falklands and Gibraltar had full British citizenship restored, similar calls from Hong Kongers were rejected by the British Government.
Instead, with the transfer of sovereignty of the region in 1997, an estimated 2.5 million British Asians in Hong Kong found themselves eligible to register as British Nationals (Overseas), a status in British nationality legislation unique to them. This gave them no more than a passport—a document to allow them to travel and to attest to their residence in Hong Kong—and consular support outside the UK and PRC.
Locating the latest provisions for the Hong Kongers in the historical context by which their legal status has been constantly downgraded and rights eroded suggests that the visa is better understood as a small concession, rather than as the ‘generous provision’ the UK government claims. The brief examples also demonstrate the ambivalent positioning of the people of Hong Kong in Britain’s bordering regimes of previous eras, neither on par with Britain’s white citizens, nor as disadvantaged through the immigration regime as other racially minoritised colonial citizens. They offer evidence of the significance of racial hierarchies within Britain’s approach to migration governance which continues to this day. Such ambivalence by design remains at play on the offer of the HK BN(O) visa.
The scheme reveals that it shares little in common with other humanitarian visas offered by the British state. Beneficiaries of the visa are unique in terms of having to pay a fee for the protections they receive and their access to healthcare. Further, offering a route to settlement for the Hong Kongers stands out in a context where an increasing number of visas—whether humanitarian or otherwise—restrict the possibilities of settlement. The provisions offered by the HK BN(O) visa converge and diverge from those offered via other migration routes and even within the suite of humanitarian protections. This is evident in the varying terms on which those with migration or refugee status living in the UK can access to housing, employment, education, healthcare and settlement.
This visa offers relative privilege to Hong Kongers, in terms of entry and in relation to those with other legal statuses. Yet, recognising that migration governance is designed to do the work of global capitalism, borders intended to regulate and control racialized migrant labor, reveals how the governance of humanitarian protections is caught up in these processes, in this way contradicting the liberal premise of such protections.
Reframing the visa in the ways outlined above demands an alternative explanation to that offered by the official narrative. For me, one solution lies in thinking with ongoing scholarly discussions about the coloniality of the UK’s migration and citizenship regime. Broadly, this framing links the post-Brexit migration regime to the longstanding role of borders in the production of racialised migrant labour within the context of the global capitalist economy. It also allows for the recognition of how the colonial relationship between Britain and the Hong Kongers shapes the provisions, the forms of migrant subjectivity these produce, and how this positions them within a racialised hierarchy of belonging.
The visa offers Hong Kongers immediate access to working in the UK. In early presentations of the scheme, potential beneficiaries were presented by Government ministers as hard working, with good work ethic, orientalising tropes reminiscent of model minority narratives. Claiming humanitarian protections in the UK, Hong Kongers are made into migrant subjects, potential ‘good migrants’ who can plug the gaps in the labour force left by Brexit. These shortages are most pronounced in roles that do not require high levels of education or skills. Yet, the Hong Kongers living in the UK are notable for their above average levels of education. In consequence, research is repeatedly finding evidence of deskilling following migration.
A further dimension of this is the money Hong Kongers have invested in property in UK since their arrival. The high levels of home ownership among this population mean that the Hong Kongers stand out in respect to others living in the UK under humanitarian protections. While understanding the role of borders in sustaining the global capitalist economy has focussed on the exploitation of migrant labour, the case of the Hong Kongers suggests the need to recognise also how the extraction of migrant capital—financial, cultural or otherwise—might also be a part of this picture.
The introduction of this visa and the terms it offers are deeply implicated in reforms to immigration and asylum initiated following Brexit. Looking up close reveals how these bespoke provisions are imagined politically as an alternative—not supplement—to the UK’s international commitments to offer humanitarian protections. The narrative framing of the visa as a necessary intervention by the UK due to the historic (colonial) obligations, identifies why the Hong Kongers are ‘deserving’ of humanitarian protections.
In this way, it echoes well-trodden ground in the politics of migration, distinctions drawn between those deemed ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, racialised logics with their routes in imperial governance practices. The flipside to the safe routes offered to the Hong Kongers and, subsequently, the Ukrainians, is the lack of routes opened up for others fleeing conflict and political oppression, notably Palestinians and Sudanese.
The mandate of ‘taking back control’ was clearly extended to humanitarian protections in the hands of the Conservative administration. The HK BN(O) visa is evidence of greater control over who it offers humanitarian protections to and on what terms, its framing and positioning integral to the production of racialized hierarchies within the post-Brexit border regime. Importantly, looking up close at the visa, locating it in longer histories of race and migration in Britain, reveals what lies beneath the veneer of ‘generosity’. Simply, rather than reconstituting Hong Kongers as British citizens with all the rights attendant to this, they have been made into the migratised subjects, exploited for and extracted from in the service of an economy still reeling from Brexit.