"the Home Secretary will reveal that 551 asylum claims have been made over the past five years by citizens of EU member states"
That's 100 a year. Drop in the ocean really."
Why should ANY asylum claims be entertained from citizens of other EU States? Asylum is granted where people flee from places where their lives or safety are under immediate threat. How many places in the EU are people in such a situation and where the local authorities do not have a scheme for their protection? And in any case, as Sandy correctly points out, all citizens of the EU have the right to settle in any part of the EU. So why is asylum deemed necessary?
Mrs May has simply woken up to a fact that many people in the UK have been aware of for the past two decades or more. It is obvious to anybody with any sense that hundreds of thousands of people arriving annually to settle is simply unsustainable and will place huge pressures on housing and services. It also clearly undermines social cohesion and it has never been demonstrated adequately that allowing such settlement provides a net economic benefit to the country. Especially when that country has 2m of its own unemployed and many of the incomers are filling jobs (at reduced rates) that those 2m “will not” undertake.
Of course, those voicing such views in the last twenty years have been howled down as racists, xenophobes, Nazis and Little Englanders. I wonder what the people throwing those insults will say about Mrs May’s pronouncement?