STUTTGART, Germany — Elliott Carlton Hines, a baritone who sings with the Stuttgart State Opera, received a text message in June that unnerved him. A friend was telling him that the state culture ministry had been asked for the nationalities of artists employed in the state-funded opera, orchestra and ballet companies, as well as where they had been educated.

The request came from the far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has a history of anti-immigrant agitation, and it made Mr. Hines, a United States citizen who was educated at Juilliard, feel nervous, he said in a recent interview. He said the request was a way of whipping up resentment against foreigners working in the arts — an assessment shared by other opera company employees.

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“You have to ask why they are asking this question,” Mr. Hines said. “Their goal is to make artists uncomfortable, and to tell us: ‘Why do you need to come here and take our jobs?’”

Alternative for Germany — widely known by its German initials, AfD — was formed in 2013 as a euroskeptic party, but it has drifted to the populist right in recent years. Its central issue is limiting immigration, and it has few concrete references to culture in its federal policy program, but party representatives have criticized what they see as an overly left-wing and multicultural government-funded arts scene.