In this thesis, Norman Fairclough’s linguistic CDA is used to analyse a Preface to a White Paper on immigration and asylum control. Three different theories are used to inform the critical reading of the linguistic analysis. These theories are Rom Harré’s social-psychological ontology of the English personal pronouns, Hannah Arendt’s concept of recognition and access to the public realm and Rogers Brubaker’s theory of the nation-state as a membership organisation. These theories are shown to be able to inform a critical linguistic analysis within the field of immigration control by analysing how social actors are embedded within a text by means of a certain situated mix of text-type, cognitive genre-activities, narrative, mixing transitive with intransitive sentences and clausal embeddedness within sentences.