Islamic State militants are behind Europe's snowballing refugee crisis and are the top danger facing the region, the Czech Republic's finance minister told CNBC on Friday.
"I think Islamic State is the biggest danger for us—and these people are leaving their countries because of Islamic State," Andrej Babis told CNBC, as European finance ministers met in Luxembourg on Friday.
Babis' comments came as thousands of migrants and refugees converge on Southern and Eastern Europe, mainly from war-torn Syria, but also from other countries in the Middle East and Africa. Many of these people are trying to travel north across the continent to reach prosperous Northern European countries such as Germany that are viewed as sympathetic to their plight.
Babis said that support from the international North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was needed to help secure Europe's borders and combat the traffickers smuggling people into the region.
"The European members of NATO and armies of Europe have to join forces," he told CNBC.
The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has called on European countries to take "concerted action" to deal with the crisis. His suggestions include a compulsory quota system across Europe to ensure that all countries take in a certain number of displaced people.
However, there is strong opposition to the mandatory relocation of migrants, particularly in Eastern Europe, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia criticizing the proposals. Poland and Romania are also opposed to taking in more migrants, although the former, like the Czech Republic, has reluctantly agreed to do so.
Speaking to CNBC in Luxembourg on Friday, Babis said it was important for a system to be in place to process asylum claims.
"We have to separate the humanitarian refugees from the economic ones," he said. "For the Czech Republic, who can count all these people? We need to have a system," he told CNBC.
In the meantime, Babis proposed closing the Schengen Area, a free-movement zone comprising of 26 European countries that have abolished the need for passports and other types of control at their common borders.
"We have maybe to learn about the immigration policy that was done in the United States—remember Ellis Island—Canada and Australia and we have to really close the Schengen border," he told CNBC on Friday.
"We have, really, to maybe organize immigration camps under the supervision of (the) United Nations and we have to fight against the smugglers, because this is the problem, they decide today which immigrants are coming to Europe."