The far-right and the refugee crisis: A study of France and Britain

Though the structure of the European Union is meant to lend itself to greater cooperation and coordination amongst its members in times of crisis, the massive influx of people flooding the region beginning in 2014 prompted a far from unified response. The strikingly different reactions of some of the Union's most prominent countries to the huge numbers of refugees, most of whom hope to escape instability in the Middle East and North Africa, reveal a specific set of individual, often diverging, policy priorities. As the voices of far-right party leaders occupy a growing space in public debate of the issue, this paper seeks to answer three questions: one, what are the political priorities of governments as they relate to immigration; two, how are these priorities translated into law; and three, what is the role of the far-right in shaping these laws? Guided by the theoretical framework of discursive institutionalism, this project uses a cross-national comparison to track the extent to which the far-right influenced immigration policy formation in two of the EU's most prominent member states---the United Kingdom and France---from the years 2000 to 2010, followed by a short complementary analysis of 2014 to the present. Results show that where it competes with a governing center-right party, the far-right is likely to wield a significant indirect influence on policy preferences.