British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson paid a short visit to Bucharest to meet Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu. In an interview granted to the national press agency Agerpres, Boris Johnson said Romanians make a massive contribution to the UK economy and that “we would be crazy to let them go back to Romania.”
“Romanians are hugely valued members of our society, they make a massive contribution to the UK economy, to the British culture. I used to be mayor of London. When you walk around London there’s lots of Romanian shops, Romanian people are doing all sorts of things, in every job in society. We think there could be 500,000 Romanians in the UK, so we would be crazy to let them go back to Romania. We want to keep them, we want to ensure that they feel secure and that their rights are protected. So, the reason I am here – I haven’t been in Romania for years, but I am so pleased to be here – I am here because we want to come directly from the Prime Minister’s Florence speech in which she explained what she wants to do and after the Brexit, we want to protect the rights of Romanians in the UK, to secure those rights, to make sure that they are guaranteed by the UK courts. But those courts would also be able to have regard to the jurisprudence, to the law of the European Court of Justice. So our objective is to make sure that the Romanian citizens in the UK feel secure,” British Secretary of State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs Boris Johnson said.
The British official added that (after Brexit) “we are not going to close. If people have talent, ambition, want to come, we would continue to be open, but we will have a system we control it, not Brussels. That’s the difference. So we would be in charge of our immigration system.”
The British Foreign Secretary met on Monday with Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu, in the context of a tour in eastern Europe to Prague, Bratislava and Bucharest, after the speech held in Florence regarding the Brexit by the British Prime Minister Theresa May.