Marine Le Pen, far-right leader of France's National Front Party, waits with the party's Louis Aliot outside an immigrant detention center during her visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa on March 14. Refugees fleeing the upheaval in North Africa are running into a different sort of political conflict in Europe. Since mid-January, more than 10,000 refugees from countries such as Tunisia... 

For decades, the French considered it taboo to question whether immigration and foreign influences were diluting France’s social and cultural character. Indeed, the topic was considered so toxic that no one in France besides extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen would even take it up in public. But times have changed. Twenty years after Le Pen’s National Front Party (FN) became a political...