JUST weeks after welcoming refugees with open arms, Germany and other European nations including Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic have reintroduced strict border controls to stop the influx of people.

On Tuesday Hungary declared a state of emergency and said it will build a wall along its border with Romania, extending the razor wire fence it has already built to seal the border with Serbia. Police also arrested 60 people under tough new laws which punish those crossing the border with three years in prison.

The state of emergency comes after Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said they would introduce passport checks on the German border for “security reasons” under an exception to the Schengen Agreement — a 22-nation pact that allows for free movement across the European Union.

“The goal of this measure is to restrict the present inflow of migrants into Germany and return again to an orderly process upon entry,” he said.

Germany is expected to receive up to 1 million new refugees and migrants this year, tens of thousands of whom have come via train from Austria and Hungary since the start of September when Chancellor Angela Merkel said they would do their part to help with the global crisis.

Only now, with cities at capacity and using school gyms and town halls for emergency accommodation, she said they simply cannot “carry on as we have done to date” and would be closing the border temporarily to install a more orderly process that involves other European nations.

The closures are a major test for Schengen which is one of the cornerstones of European policy and has led to a domino effect. Austria has implemented spot checks and deployed more than 2000 troops for humanitarian reasons and to guard the border.

Austrian Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner said: “if Germany does border controls, then Austria must also strengthen border controls — in the interest of the domestic population — and we are doing this now.”

“This will also be a clear signal in the direction of those affected that the disorderly crossing of the border can no longer take place in the future.”

Overnight, EU ministers agreed in principle on quotas to relocate 12,000 asylum seekers, but have scheduled another meeting for October.

Germany wants other countries to do their share in re-settling refugees but the decision to install checks is being seen as a backflip by Merkel’s critics after she welcomed them following the publication of a picture of dead toddler Aylan Kurdi which prompted a wave of sympathy across Europe.

Now, authorities say they are struggling to cope with the influx and simply don’t have space for more arrivals. However Germany’s conservative newspaper Die Welt wondered if refugee policy had been “well thought through” while UK Independence Party Nigel Farage said shutting the border meant: “the German government has realised the scale of their error”.

Chancellor Merkel’s allies in Bavaria — the southern region where most of the people have arrived — have also called it a “mistake”. State Premier Horst Seehofer said “We are getting ourselves into an emergency situation we soon won’t be able to control”.

CSU’s Vice President Hans-Peter Friedrich has raised the possibility extremists could be entering, saying “one can’t really estimate how many IS fighters or Islamists are among them.”

For now, thousands of refugees are stranded at the Hungarian border, sandwiched in between countries with no main route to get through.

But despite the criticism, Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said it doesn’t mean the country is backtracking — they simply want greater help from other nations.

“The temporary border controls do not mean that the borders are being closed,” he said.

“Refugees will continue to come to Germany. We hope that this can happen in a more orderly process and in a fully European process in which every member state does its duty of solidarity.”

Chancellor Merkel will meet with leaders in Germany’s 16 state leaders today.