Marine Le Pen has toned down the far-right National Front party's tone toward immigrants, but some analysts say the political group is still "hostile." Fancois Nascimbeni/AFP/Getty Images

France is set to welcome 500 Syrian refugees, reports say, at a time when what many call an anti-immigrant, far-right National Front Party is making strides in local elections and popularity polls — a sign Arab and Muslim community advocates say has grim portents for France's immigrants.

Philippe Leclerc, the French representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told French newspaper Le Figaro Wednesday that President Francois Hollande agreed to accept the Syrian immigrants, after requests from the United Nations that European nations help alleviate the toll massive inflows of refugees have taken on Syria's Middle Eastern neighbors.

Also on Wednesday, a survey conducted by news channel BFM TV and pollster CSA revealed that close to one in two French nationals see Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front, as the "strongest opposition leader" against the Socialist Hollande and his Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.

It appears, according to some French Arabs, that France's political climate is not an ideal one for Arab immigration.

"The National Front's discourse is dangerous," said Tarik Fadili, 34, an Arab and Muslim community rights advocate living in the southern city of Montpellier, "I don't want to live in a country where the National Front is gaining in power."

Although Le Pen has toned down party's tone on French immigrants — many of whom are from France's former colonies in North and Sub-Saharan Africa — since her father and National Front founding leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's vitriolic diatribes against Muslims, Jews and blacks, the party is still "hostile" toward immigrants.

"Marine Le Pen has been trying for the past few years to completely rebrand the National Front to make it more like a mainstream party, rather than an extreme party of agitators," Karim Emile Bitar, director of Paris-based international relations think tank, the Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques (IRIS), told Al Jazeera.

Bitar explained that while Le Pen has attempted to steer the party away from the "skinhead and neo-Nazi groups" it has previously "tolerated" within its ranks, it "still from time to time sends discreet signals to genuine racists within the electorate."

"I would kick out all the foreign fundamentalists," Le Pen told Le Monde newspaper late last year, "All of them! We know who they are."

As Europe continues to struggle with the Eurozone crisis and the austerity measures imposed in response, the National Front's anti-immigrant policies are likely to continue gaining ground with French voters.

In France's current economic environment, "you get angry electorates, you get anti-immigrant sentiment. You get far-right populists. The Front National is likely to do well for the foreseeable future," said Charles Kupchan, a European Union analyst with Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Many [of the FN's constituents] are underprivileged people who want to register a protest vote," Bitar said.

The ruling Socialist Party expressed dismay Monday after the National Front got 40.4 percent of votes in the first round of a local by-election in Brignoles, saying it was a sign that the party would see unprecedented wins in municipal elections next March.