“People have become much more aggressive than before,” she said. When she is not vacationing in Zaube, she lives in a suburb of Riga, where her daily commute, she said, is becoming littered with verbal abuse. Interactions on buses and trams, she said, often involve her being told to “go back to where you come from,” and tend to end with awkward moments when she replies to the person confronting her in perfect Latvian.

“If they are so afraid,” she said, “it shows they are not strong, and they don’t believe in their own culture.”

Mr. Rasnacs, the justice minister, said the law was not about the number of people covering their faces in Latvia, but had more to do with ensuring that prospective immigrants respect the norms of this small and homogeneous country.

Sitting by the crimson and white of a Latvian flag during an interview in Riga, Mr. Rasnacs added, “We do not only protect Latvian cultural-historical values, but the cultural-historical values of Europe.”

Like other countries in the region, Latvia has been reluctant to take in sizable numbers of the migrants who have arrived on the Continent over the last year, with more than a million ending up in Germany. After protracted negotiations, Latvia agreed to accept up to 776 refugees over the next two years, under the European Union’s faltering effort to resettle refugees among all of its 28 member states.

So far, just six of the 776 have arrived. But practical policy questions of housing and integrating the rest remain submerged by increasingly fearful discussions of Islam — propelled by regular news coverage associating the religion with terrorist attacks, sexual assaults and civil wars — and by an absence of historical experience with Muslims among the population, combined with traumatic memories of the country’s past under Soviet rule. For nearly 50 years, the country had no control over its migration policy, leading to a large Russian-speaking minority.