The Continuity of Imperial Ambiguity in British News: A Critical Discourse Study on the BN(O) Visa Scheme

This paper examines how the British National (Overseas) visa scheme is discursively constructed in British news and argues that its underlying discursive ambiguity is a reproduction of imperial modes of population management. Drawing on Critical Discourse Studies and postcolonial theory—particularly Benson’s (2021) notion of ambiguity by design—the analysis foregrounds how the legal ambiguity of BN(O) status is discursively manifested and reproduced. Using corpus-assisted analysis of news articles from The Guardian and The Daily Mail, this study traces how applicants of this scheme are simultaneously constructed as politically deserving and economically desirable, as both refugees and lifestyle migrants, and ambiguously positioned as partial members of British society through their BN(O) passports. These constructions obscure the colonial genealogy of the scheme while rendering it morally legible. News discourse, through the reproduction of government language and the absence of historicisation, participates in a broader sociocultural system that normalises racialised exclusion. The BN(O) visa thus exemplifies how Britain’s immigration regime produces discursive ambiguity by design: it blurs the boundary between refuge and exclusion, redress and control, while sustaining moral authority through humanitarian frames.