ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major French political issues, which are growing hostility to immigrants and the emergence of immigration, and discusses immigration policy. By the 1980s, growing hostility to immigrants was the result not just of pressure from the extreme right but also of a secular change in policy and attitude that had begun during the Algerian War and that all political parties did little to stem. The National Front (NF) did not create a climate of hostility to immigrants. Rather, the NF hopped onto a bandwagon that was already under way. The Front links utilitarian arguments about the social cost of immigration to an ideology of "difference". Front ideologists claim that the true racists today are those who wish to get rid of national differences and to subsume national identity under some universalistic or mondialiste philosophy. The Front often charges its opponents with "anti-French racism".
