English: Mayor of London, Boris Johnson poses for a photo prior to ringing the opening bell at NASDAQ on September 14, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In this highly controversial article, the Mail reports the London Mayor bluntly rejecting warnings from Prime Minister David Cameron about the impacts of Brexit as tensions over the looming referendum ramped up.
Source: Boris Johnson dismisses fears that trade will be hit by Brexit | Daily Mail Online
Unfortunately, Johnson is big on rhetoric and light on evidence. There have been numerous outstanding papers by world class experts warning of the risks of Brexit.
The Mail is irresponsible in highlighting Johnson’s comments about being overrun with Turks. There is no agreement for Turkey to join the EU and certainly not for Turks to have free access to jobs.
The Economist reported that immigration is likely to continue even if the UK leaves the EU because of the skills shortage in the UK. Indeed it is probably the lazy, aging poorly skilled people who don’t want to work to whom Johnson is appealing.
The Out campaign are putting immigration ahead of the risk of real economic hardship. Johnson has shown that his judgement is seriously questionable.
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
The terms of an agreement for Turkey to join the EU have been discussed but not yet agreed publicly.
That said Erdogan expects £3 billion GBP a year for the deal already done on migrants and he expects the EU to make Turkey a full member in 5 years (2021).
In the event of delays by Germany vis-a-vis Turkish membership, Erdogan has said that he will turn on the “floodgates”, by which he means many more economic migrants will be unleashed to go to Europe. When he was offered half the amount of money he wanted for the deal on migration he concentrated the minds of Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Donald Tusk by saying publicly, “Do you take us for fools, it is costing us up to £6 billion GBP a year to take the number of refugees we have already? Of course, the £6 billion GBP figure was an exaggeration but the wily Erdogan got the figure he wanted and made fools out of Merkel, Cameron and Tusk who between them and the rest of the EU stumped up the first £3 billion GBP.
Dr Alf is right in this piece from the Daily Mail to point out that Turkey is not yet a member of the EU; there is however a clear direction of travel in that David Cameron and the Americans have each been pushing very hard for EU enlargement right up to the Russian border despite Merkel’s preference for letting Turkey become an EU member and splitting the Ukraine into two spheres, one Russian and the other aligned with the EU.
Current forward deployments of American military hardware and special forces in all the countries to the West of the Ukraine and help provided to the Ukrainian military are being increased for the purpose of driving the EU border eastwards not just protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Turks can already work in Germany and Syrian refugees and economic migrants already allowed into Turkey can allegedly already access bogus documentation and NI numbers from the 19 million spare numbers that are available in pubs, rogue religious establishments and from people smugglers.
Turkish border guards can and are being bribed to let people go for trivial sums so the prospect for Europe and Britain is more Turks and more migrants of all kinds.
The UK is possibly the weakest link in the border defences of Europe since we have no E-Borders programme to count people in and out, inadequate passport checks (only 88% at airports) and practically none at bus and ferry terminals.
Our UK coastline remains unprotected because our single coastal protection vessel was scrapped in 2012 and now we learn that not one of our maritime patrol vessels is available because they have all been sent to Calais.
Last year nearly 700,000 people were issued with NI numbers but officially the ONS figures showed that 265,000 migrants had arrived.The difference could not have been made up by legal migration or school leavers since the time of year was wrong and the official ONS figures do not take the 7 million illegal immigrants already here into account. Since the time of the late Enoch Powell the Home Office has been allegedly fiddling immigration and crime figures and the ONS, although well meaning and basically honest in its approach to number crunching ends up underestimating what is going on because they are fed incorrect and incomplete data as evidenced by their refusal, couched in very careful language, to believe /sign off the crime figures from Chief Constables via the Home Office.
The American Department Of Homeland Security is not happy about EU and UK border controls, numbers of migrants nor the quality and veracity of passports and EU/UK identification documentation, to the point where it has suspended its “Visa Waiver Programme” until such time as it deems that the UK and the EU have tightened up their procedures.
This process of “tightening up” is not in evidence and is being exploited by smuggling gangs bring people into the country by rubber boats to remote parts of the coast, lorries marked TIR being used to smuggle people and by almost nonexistent border controls at ferry and bus terminals.
The UK is already being flooded with all kinds of undocumented and fake documented migrants and the migration deal with Turkey, irrespective of Turkey’s accession to full EU membership will accelerate the process unless it is stopped.
Boris Johnson, for reasons of political ambition does not go into this sort of detail and the Daily Mail is written for people with a reading age of 9 who are not detail oriented. That said, they have in their processes of headline seeking and sensationalism hit upon elements of the truth and a very real problem that the EU under its present leadership is not addressing.