The effort to track all passenger movements in and out of the UK by 2014 in the fight against terrorists and known criminals was stepped.
UK Border Agency (UKBA) officers will work alongside the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the police to share intelligence and issue alerts where a suspect is identified by electronic border checks.
Electronic checks on passenger data will be conducted even before a person sets foot on a plane.
The UKBA's operational hub for e-Borders will replace the smaller Joint Border Operations Centre at Heathrow and create around 250 jobs in the North West.
Mr Johnson said: "Thanks to our hi-tech e-Borders system, the UK now has one of the strongest borders in the world. It means we can count people in and out of the UK and capture known criminals, terror suspects and illegal migrants while gathering evidence against smugglers and people traffickers.
"Already e-Borders has had a huge impact, helping us catch more than 5,400 criminals including rapists and murderers.
"This new centre will up the ante, increasing the amount of data we can screen, so we can track all passenger movements in and out of the UK by 2014."
More than 100 million passenger movements in and out of the UK were checked against UKBA and police watch lists last year, said the UKBA. The checks alerted the police to wanted UK and foreign nationals flying into British airports, allowing arrests to be made as soon as the individual landed or for them to be returned on the next flight.
The NBTC receives information on passengers and crew and aims to eventually check an estimated 250 million passenger movements per year. It will also process visa application data for overseas posts by checking the applicant and sponsor details against watch lists. Monitoring of passengers by sea or rail will later be rolled out at the NTBC as it aims to meet a 100 per cent screening target by 2014.
It aims to screen 95 per cent of all passenger movements in and out of the UK by the end of this year - an ambition which the Conservative Party said was "completely implausible".