This paper offers a view from below onto the Hong Kong BN(O) visa, one of the flagship schemes in the UK Government’s suite of ‘safe and legal routes’. It centres the voices of Hong Kongers arriving in the UK since 2021, exploring how they make sense of these provisions, narrate their experiences of their immigration status, and how they understand this in relation to routes on offer to others arriving in the UK post-Brexit, and within the context of the politicisation of migration and asylum. Through this empirical focus, it offers new insights that reveal how Hong Kongers position themselves on the migration-asylum continuum; how they interpret and reproduce the UK’s ‘generosity’, including how they navigate understandings and expectations of what it means to be a ‘good migrant’; and what this makes visible about the coloniality of migration and citizenship in the UK’s post-Brexit migration regime.