by the UK. Some British politicians and magazines also criticised the creation of BN(O) status. In 2020, the British government under Boris Johnson announced a programme under which BN(O)s would have leave to remain in the UK with rights to work and study for five years, after which they may apply for settled status. They would then be eligible for full citizenship after holding settled status for 12 months. This was implemented as the eponymously named "British National (Overseas) visa", a residence permit that BN(O)s and their dependent family members have been able to apply for since 31 January 2021. BN(O)s and their dependents who arrived in the UK before the new immigration route became available were granted "Leave Outside the Rules" at the discretion of the Border Force to remain in the country for up to six months as a temporary measure. In effect, this retroactively granted BN(O)s a path to right of abode in the United Kingdom. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, about 7,000 people had entered the UK under this scheme between July 2020 and January 2021. Ethnic tensions created during colonial occupation also resulted in discriminatory policies being adopted in newly independent African nations, such as Uganda under Idi Amin which banned Asians from Uganda, thus creating a mass exodus of the (largely Gujarati) Asian community of Uganda. Such ethnically driven border control policies took forms ranging from anti-Asian sentiment in East Africa to Apartheid policies in South Africa and Namibia (then known as Southwest Africa under South African rule) which created bantustans and pass laws to segregate and impose border controls against non-whites, and encouraged immigration of whites at the expense of Blacks as well as Indians and other Asians. Whilst border control in Europe and east of the Pacific have tightened over time, they have largely been liberalised in Africa, from Yoweri Museveni's reversal of Idi Amin's anti-Asian border controls to the fall of Apartheid (and thus racialised border controls) in South Africa. The development of border control policies over the course of the 20th century also saw the standardisation of refugee travel documents under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and the 1954 Convention travel document for stateless people under the similar 1954 statelessness convention. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 produced a drastic tightening of border controls across the globe. Many countries and regions have imposed quarantines, entry bans, or