It’s not just us. The British have an immigration problem, too. All of the EU nations are subject to “free movement laws,” which allow for citizens of EU member nations to freely move from one member country to another. This has steadily taken a toll on western Europe as citizens of poorer nations have been able to move into countries like Great Britain, find some kind of employment for the short term, and then partake of the many welfare benefits that the British government offers. And in January of this year, Romania and Bulgaria were added to the list of nations allowed free movement within the EU. The change in the laws was not widely welcomed in Britain, and now, Prime Minister David Cameron has just announced that his coalition will be introducing legislation that will limit the unemployment benefits that EU migrants can claim to three months, instead of the six that it has been until now.

Prime Minister Cameron wrote a piece for the Telegraph which said, in part:

Our goal is clear: an immigration system that puts Britain first. Achieving that means doing three things: clamping down on abuses of the system; making sure the right people are coming here for the right reasons; and ensuring the British people get a fair deal.

We’re also making sure people come for the right reasons – which has meant addressing the magnetic pull of Britain’s benefits system. We changed the rules so that no one can come to this country and expect to get out-of-work benefits immediately; they must wait at least three months. And we are announcing today that we are cutting the time people can claim these benefits for. It used to be that European arrivals could claim Jobseeker’s Allowance or child benefit for a maximum of six months before their benefits would be cut off, unless they had very clear job prospects. I can tell Telegraph readers today that we will be reducing that cut-off point to three months, saying very clearly: you cannot expect to come to Britain and get something for nothing.

The British people have been slowly waking up to Margaret Thatcher’s truism – “…Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them.”

The British government has been a welfare state for a long time, and has been growing ever larger with each passing year. There are stories of rampant welfare abuse by British citizens, and now the rest of the EU knows that those benefits can be theirs, too. And the EU told Britain back in December that the surge in EU migration was Britain’s own fault for offering welfare benefits that were so generous.

Even though the British government – and the population – are waking up to the fact that the welfare state has gone amok, will simply trimming the time on benefits, enforcing rules on immigration, and making sure that “British residents come first,” as Prime Minister Cameron put it, really fix the problem?

The simple answer is no. British liberals insist that immigration is a net good, and British conservatives are tired of seeing their tax money disappear into the hands of those who never paid into the system to start with. This argument is starting to sound familiar, huh? The British welfare system is a generous one, and if Cameron does manage to get these new limitations into place, it only means that those wanting to game the system will have to play a better game, with more evasion, than what they are doing now. And let’s not even get into the now-homegrown problem of radical Islam that has grown into Great Britain – one that finds British-born Muslims bombing the London subways and can decapitate a random British soldier in broad daylight.

I sincerely do hope that Cameron and company can save themselves and their nation from complete financial fallout. But I am afraid that after decades and decades of nationalized caretaking, the British people no longer have it in themselves to go through the pain of reducing benefits to make their country less attractive to the EU’s wave of migrants.

And what about us, the American population? What are we willing to do to keep our borders from being overrun? We are under no legal obligation to take in everyone who crosses our border, be they adult or child. There is no “free movement law” that requires us to do that. We can’t even care properly for our own veterans, but we are expected to be the sugar daddy of North America? Even the liberals who talk up our obligations to illegal immigrants in public, privately ask that those illegals not be sent to their state.

If we were smart, we’d be taking a hard look at what Britain is facing right now, and take a few notes. Maybe more than a few. But at least Cameron is going to try. We used to have leaders like that here… but we don’t right now.