Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have spent weeks portraying Nikki Haley as a bleeding heart on immigration as he tries to dispatch her as his last remaining rival for the 2024 Republican nomination.

In Mr. Trump's words, Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a “globalist” who reversed her support for Mr. Trump's hardline policies before serving as his ambassador to the United States . the United Nations. Ahead of the two candidates' showdown in the South Carolina primary on February 24, his surrogates have accused her of being a secret liberal who supports open borders and won't do enough to curb the flow of migrants and refugees into the country .

But it's a portrait almost unrecognizable to many who knew her as governor: the Republican state lawmakers who counted on her support for immigration restrictions; the longtime immigrant rights activists in South Carolina who fought her on the legislation; the conservative religious leaders who were disappointed by her opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to resettle in the state. Trump's attacks are complicated by her record as a staunch conservative on the issue, they said, even as she maintained her support for legal immigration as her party shifted its focus to more extreme immigration restrictions.

Larry Grooms, a South Carolina state senator who in 2011 helped push through the immigration restrictions that Ms. Haley is now pushing, said it was disheartening to hear from Republican colleagues who were in the trenches with him on that bill now joining in Mr. Trump's attacks on her on the issue.

“It was one of the toughest battles I've ever fought in the Legislature, and if Nikki Haley hadn't rolled up her sleeves and pushed the ball, it wouldn't have happened,” he said, citing distortions of her record service wrong. and 'unfair'. He has supported Ms. Haley.

Since she entered politics in 2004, Ms. Haley has held positions on immigration that have remained largely consistent, as evidenced by a review of her past statements, her legislative history, and interviews with both supporters and opponents. She has long advocated improving legal routes into the United States while aggressively restricting illegal ones. And she often bases her beliefs on her own heritage.

“I am the proud daughter of legal immigrants – emphasis on the legal,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir, “Can't Is Not an Option.” Her parents, she wrote, left a prosperous life in India before eventually migrating to Canada and the United States, although she and her associates declined to provide details.

As a state lawmaker in 2008, Ms. Haley supported legislation that turned South Carolina into a coup the first state to explicitly prohibit undocumented students from enrolling in public colleges and universities. But it was the tough immigration measures she signed in 2011 that thrust South Carolina into the national spotlight. At the time, a faction of the conservative Tea Party movement That helped propel her own rise in politics and fueled a broader wave of crackdowns in the Sun Belt, just as states in the Deep South saw increases in their small Latino populations.

The South Carolina measures, which were modeled on Arizona's strict “show-me-your-papers” law and went nearly as far, prompted a lawsuit from the Obama administration while fueling concerns that this would encourage the racial and ethnic profiling of Latinos. . It too prohibited professional licenses for undocumented immigrants, excluding even those who attended private or foreign universities from certain professions in the state.

Mr. Grooms said Ms. Haley helped align members of her party in the final push to get the deal approved. Tom Davis, a Republican senator in South Carolina who is backing Ms. Haley's presidential bid, pointed to her seal of approval for the bill as an example that Trump's claims about her record were “pure fiction.”

“Anyone who looks at Nikki Haley's record and says she's progressive or says she's not conservative is just not doing their homework,” he said.

And yet Ms. Haley found herself caught up in her party's shifting headwinds on immigration, as reform deals failed in Congress and her party's immigration hawks moved further to the right.

In 2015, Ms. Haley faced backlash from local Republicans for her support of Republicans efforts of faith groups to resettle people in South Carolina. She ultimately took an aggressive stance against the resettlement of Syrians in her state after the terror attacks in Paris that same year, citing intelligence gaps that could complicate the vetting process.

The following year Mrs. Haley delivered the Republican response to President Obama's final State of the Union address. She urged not to follow “the siren call of the angriest voices” and extended a hand of welcome to immigrants who play by the rules — a move that many of her Republican critics still see as a rebuke of Trump's demonizing rhetoric during his campaign.

Lee Bright, a former senator who is not aligned with the 2024 race, claimed that Ms. Haley was more conservative on the issue when she entered the State House but appeared to become more liberal over time. During the debate over Syrian refugees, he recalled, she would have ruined the prospects of a bill that would have held aid agencies liable for violent acts committed in the US by anyone they sponsored.

Now, he argues, Ms. Haley is getting more credit than she deserves for the tough legislation Republican state lawmakers have written.

“President Trump is absolutely right,” he said, she is “a flip-flopper.”

Ms. Haley is campaigning in her home state and has fired back more forcefully against attacks on her record, though she faces an uphill battle. Trump, who continues to dominate the polls in South Carolina by double digits, has more than 80 current and former Republican state officials endorsing his campaign, including Governor Henry McMaster and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.

In recent days, she has argued that when she signed that 2011 legislation, Trump was “still a New York liberal” and donated money to Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris. She has called him “irresponsible” for his recent intervention in a Republican-led immigration deal in Congress, slowing progress as the crisis at the border grows.

She continues to express support for renewing options for legal immigration, based on business need and merit, and for strengthening the asylum system that she says protects persecuted people, such as the Afghan interpreters who support her husband, Major Michael Haley. helped when he was abroad. But her positions on illegal immigration have kept pace with her party's new conservative extremes under Trump: She has expressed support for deploying the military against Mexican drug cartels, restricting birthright rights and sending millions of migrants back to their home countries .

She supports the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which grants work permits and temporary legal status to 570,000 people brought to the United States as children. But she calls it the “carrot” on the stick that should be used to push for a broader and tougher overhaul of immigration laws.

Mr. Trump, in ads, interviews and rallies, has promised a return to his own hardline policies if elected and has escalated his rhetoric on the southern border, describing undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The impact of the measures South Carolina instituted in 2011 is difficult to quantify. Federal courts blocked some aspects, including provisions requiring law enforcement to check the immigration status of some people at routine stops and requiring immigrants to carry federal registration documents. But a portion of the law that required illegal immigrants to be transferred from state to federal custody was upheld.

The most important provision that remains untouched to this day requires companies to verify that their employees are legally in the country. But a 2018 study from the Cato Institutea libertarian research center, found that it had serious problems because it misidentified a small number of legal workers as undocumented, imposed expensive costs and regulatory burdens on companies, and fueled a black market in document forgery and identity theft.

In interviews, Mexican immigrant students and activists, some of whom were undocumented, recalled living in fear of authorities during Ms. Haley's two terms in office, barely leaving their homes and remaining alert for raids.

Erika Hernandez Perez, 26, a DACA recipient who was enrolled in cosmetology classes, said her career dreams were crushed when she was barred from obtaining her license in 2015, when South Carolina, under Ms. Haley, became states that persisted in full recognition the DACA program..

She eventually went to work for her parents' food truck and saved enough money to open her own restaurant in Greenville, serving her native Oaxacan dishes.

“I understand her position on illegal immigration because, as she has said before, her parents came here legally,” she said of Ms. Haley. But she added that she also wished Ms. Haley had more sympathy for young immigrants whose parents were not wealthy or highly educated.

Diana Mesa, 21, who was in high school in 2011, remembers the tensions in her small Latino community in Spartanburg, S.C., amid the crackdown. She was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and moved to South Carolina as a child after her father got a job at a BMW factory. Although she and her parents had legal status, other family members did not, and they often had to watch each other, she said.

“It was really a taste,” she recalled, of what was to come under Trump.

Susan C. Beachy research contributed.

A U.S. foreign development agency said Wednesday it will lend $553 million to build a deepwater container terminal at Sri Lanka’s Colombo Port, expanding U.S. efforts to finance infrastructure around strategic parts of Asia.

The loan package is linked to Adani Ports, part of a conglomerate closely linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and still reeling from January’s onslaught of short sellers. Adani will help develop the terminal together with Sri Lankan partners.

The money from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation resembles the kind of big deals Chinese development banks have been making around the world over the past decade. Under the Belt and Road Initiative, which was central to President Xi Jinping’s foreign policy, China provided loans to build ties with Asia, including Sri Lanka. Now the United States, and to some extent India, plans to catch up – or even improve.

The Development Finance Corporation was created during the Trump administration to finance international infrastructure projects and work with the State Department to support U.S. foreign policy and curb Chinese influence.

“The realities in this region and for global trade make this a critical addition to our global infrastructure,” Scott Nathan, CEO of the US agency, told a news conference in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital. He was joined by Karan Adani, the CEO of Adani Ports and a son of the group’s founder, Gautam Adani, who went a step further in his comments and appeared to invoke defense considerations by saying that the additional half a billion dollars would be ‘regional symbolizes safety’. .”

While they took turns describing how the loan demonstrates America’s and India’s commitment to this debt-ridden island nation and to the rest of the Indo-Pacific, they did not mention China by name, but there was no need to.

An international port project has special significance for Sri Lanka. Located at a watershed between the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, the country sees about half of the world’s trading ships pass by. The port of Colombo, the busiest on the Indian Ocean, has been operating at 90 percent capacity for years.

Under the Rajapaksas, the ruling family that led Sri Lanka until the country’s economy collapsed in 2022, Chinese banks and engineering firms built a massive deepwater port on the island’s relatively remote southern coast. Hambantota, the name of that project, was the white elephant in the room during today’s opening statements.

Built at a cost of more than a billion dollars and on terms that Sri Lanka could never repay, Hambantota, located in a stronghold of Rajapaksa’s political power, was eventually forfeited to China under a 99-year lease, along with 15,000 hectares of nearby land. . In 2020, before the pandemic disrupted trade, the port handled just 1.2 million tons of cargo per year. The Port of Colombo handles more than 30 million tons of cargo annually and plans to quadruple that amount with new terminals.

Hambantota has become a hallmark of what President Biden called China’s “debt trap diplomacy” at the first Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity Leaders’ Summit in Washington last week.

Mr. Nathan told the news conference that the Biden administration’s infrastructure investments are “transparent and do not burden countries with debt at the state level.”

India, too, has its eyes on China as it struggles to gain or maintain influence in the rest of South Asia. Indian and Chinese diplomats have long tried to profile their countries as the indispensable partner of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The US loan means we are moving closer to the way India finances long-term projects. Under Mr. Modi, that meant doing a lot of business with the country’s largest conglomerates. One of the most prominent is the Adani Group, which had seen its share price rise 2,500 percent in five years until it was hit by a report released in January by New York-based Hindenburg Research accusing the conglomerate of stock manipulation and accounting fraud.

Adani Group’s value plummeted and a public offering had to be cancelled. At the time, the company accused its foreign critics of launching a “calculated attack on India” that reflected “contempt for Indian institutions.” Most of the conglomerate’s shares are still trading well below their peaks, and Mr Modi no longer appears in public alongside Gautam Adani. But the conglomerate’s finances have stabilized and some of its constituent companies, including Adani Ports, have recovered their market value.

The Biden administration’s willingness to do business with Adani Group could improve the company’s reputation abroad. Karan Adani said the port deal was a “reaffirmation by the international community of our vision, capacity and governance”.

Washington’s willingness to finance a complicated and strategic infrastructure deal also marks a step forward for its ambitions in the region. It seems to confirm Mr Adani’s view: “The relationship between Sri Lanka, the US and India is multi-faceted and promising.”

The group of major oil-producing nations, known as OPEC Plus, said on Sunday it would undertake a complex effort to adjust production to halt the recent drop in oil prices, including an additional cut of one million in production. barrels per day by Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi rebate would be for one month starting in July, but could be extended.

The group, which includes Russia and its allies, has been under pressure to broker a deal to reverse the pessimism that has dominated the oil market in recent weeks. Despite two substantial cuts in production since October, oil prices have fallen about 15 percent over the past seven months.

The resulting deal reworks several countries’ production quotas, with some production levels rising and some falling. “This is certainly not a clean and simple deal,” said Richard Bronze, chief of geopolitics at Energy Aspects, a research firm.

OPEC Plus said in a statement it was acting “to achieve and maintain a stable oil market,” continuing its recent “proactive and preemptive” approach.

In terms of markets, the main feature of the agreement is the additional production cut by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Oil Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman called the move “the Saudi lollipop,” as he announced it at a post-meeting press conference.

Oil officials met in Vienna over the weekend to decide what to do with markets that have weakened in recent weeks. In particular, Prince Abdulaziz had warned that the group could cut production to jack up prices and trip up traders betting on lower prices.

Other producers, including Russia, are less enthusiastic about cutting production.

Sunday’s meeting came just two months after OPEC Plus announced an earlier round of austerity. Those trims started in May and have had little time to make an impact. Analysts also say oil markets — where prices have fallen by about 12 percent since mid-April — have been heavily impacted by broader economic factors, including China’s weaker-than-expected economic growth since the end of its “zero Covid” policy. That could reduce the impact of cuts.

On Thursday and Friday, after Washington reached a deal on the debt ceiling, prices for Brent oil, the international benchmark, rose by about $3 a barrel to about $76 a barrel, but prices remain slightly below pre-dawn levels of the April cut.

Saudi Arabia’s announcement comes a few days before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit the country for talks with Saudi leaders.

Saudi Arabia is the de facto leader of OPEC Plus, and under Prince Abdulaziz and his younger half-brother, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country has become more aggressive in its oil policy than in the past, preferring to cut back on a floor below prices instead of letting the markets take their course.

Crown Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s chief policymaker, wants high oil revenues to finance his ambitious development plans.

While OPEC does not publish price targets and its officials say it has a long-term view, analysts say the Saudis are now uncomfortable with prices below $80 a barrel of Brent oil. With OPEC Plus producing more than 40 percent of the world’s oil supplies, if they try hard enough, the group can exert significant influence over the markets.

In the past, Saudi Arabian-led OPEC trims have caused friction with the Biden administration, which wants to keep oil prices low to ease pressure on American drivers and prevent them from putting the brakes on the already weak global economy .

Midway through his face-to-face meeting with President Biden in Indonesia last fall, Chinese leader Xi Jinping issued an unsolicited warning.

Mr Biden had signed a series of laws in previous months to boost America’s industrial capacity and impose new restrictions on technology exports to China, hoping to dominate the race for advanced energy technologies that could help climate change to fight. For months he and his aides had been working to recruit allied countries to impose their own restrictions on sending technology to China.

The effort echoed the kind of industrial policy China had pursued to become the world’s manufacturing leader. In Bali, Mr. Xi join Mr. Pray to give it up.

The president was not convinced.

As Mr. Biden and fellow Group of 7 country leaders meet this weekend in Hiroshima, Japan, a focal point of their discussions will be how to quickly accelerate what has become an internationally coordinated round of massive public investment. For these wealthy democracies, the goal is both to reduce their dependence on Chinese manufacturing and to help their own companies compete in a new energy economy.

Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda, including bills targeting semiconductors, infrastructure and low-emission energy sources, is beginning to lead to potentially trillions of dollars in government and private investment in US industrial capacity. Think of subsidies for electric vehicles, batteries, wind farms, solar power plants and much more.

The spending — the United States’ most significant industrial policy intervention in decades — has goaded many of America’s best allies in Europe and Asia, including key leaders of the Group of 7. European countries, South Korea, Japan, Canada and others push for better access to America’s clean energy grants while launching their own outreach efforts.

“This clean-tech race is an opportunity to go faster and further together,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said after a meeting on economics at the Group of 7 summit on Friday.

“With the G7 in this race together, our competition should create additional production capacity and not at the expense of each other,” she said.

Mr. Biden and his Group of 7 counterparts have embarked on a project with two ambitious goals: to accelerate demand, even by decades, for the technologies needed to reduce emissions and combat climate change, and to empower workers in the United States and related countries an advantage over Chinese workers to meet that demand.

Much of that project has roared to life since G7 leaders met in the German Alps last year. The wave of recent actions by the Group of 7 on supply chains, semiconductors and other measures to counter China has been based on “economic security, national security and energy security,” Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador to Japan, told reporters this week in Tokyo.

He added: “This is a turning point for a new and more relevant G7.”

Mr Emanuel said the effort reflected growing impatience among Group of 7 leaders with what they call Beijing’s use of economic measures to punish and deter behavior by foreign governments and companies that Chinese officials dislike.

But most of all, the shift has been fueled by the urgency of climate action and by two bills Biden signed last summer: a bipartisan bill to shower the semiconductor industry with tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies, and the climate provisions of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which companies are on. played in.

Those bills have led to a flurry of newly announced battery factories, solar panel factories and other projects. They have also launched an international subsidy race, which has evolved after being highly contentious in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the climate law.

The lucrative US support for clean energy and semiconductors – along with stricter requirements for companies and government agencies to buy US-made steel, vehicles and equipment – ​​have put unwelcome pressure on competitive industries in allied countries.

Some of those concerns have been allayed in recent months. The United States signed an agreement with Japan in March allowing battery materials made in Japan to qualify for the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act. The European Union is seeking a similar deal and has proposed its own $270 billion program to subsidize green industries. Canada has passed its own version of the Biden climate bill and Britain, Indonesia and other countries are angling for their own critical minerals deals.

Government officials say once-bad allies have bought into the potential benefits of a coordinated industrial strategy for a wealthy democracy.

At the Group of 7 meeting, “you see a degree of agreement on this that, from our perspective, can continue the conversion of the Inflation Reduction Act from a source of friction to a source of cooperation and strength between the United States and our G7 partners,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, told Air Force One reporters as Biden flew to Japan.

Some Group of 7 officials say the alliance has much more work to do to ensure that high-growth economies like India benefit from increased investment in a new energy economy. “It is important that the acceleration this creates does not discourage investment around the world,” Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, said in an interview.

One country they don’t want to see benefited is China. The United States has imposed sweeping restrictions on China’s access to US technology, namely advanced chips and the machines used to make them. And it leans on its allies as it tries to impose global restrictions on technology sharing with Russia and China. All these efforts are designed to hinder China’s continued development in advanced manufacturing.

Biden officials have urged allied countries not to intervene to supply China with chips and other products it can no longer get from the United States. The United States is also considering further restrictions on certain types of Chinese chip technology, including a likely ban on venture capital investments that US officials are expected to discuss with their counterparts in Hiroshima.

While many of the Group of 7 governments agree that China poses a growing economic and security threat, there is little consensus on what to do about it.

Japanese officials have been relatively eager to discuss coordinated responses to economic coercion from China, following Beijing’s move to cut off Japan from a supply of rare-earth metals in a collision more than a decade ago.

European officials, on the other hand, are more divided on whether or not to establish close and lucrative business ties with China. Some, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, have reversed US plans to disconnect supply chains with China.

Mrs von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, has been insist on a “risk reduction” of relations with China that means acknowledging China’s growing economic and security ambitions, while at the same time reducing Europe’s dependence on China for its industrial and defense base in targeted ways. European officials said in Hiroshima they were pleased to see US leaders moving more towards their approach, at least rhetorically.

Yet the Allies’ industrial policy threatens to complicate an already strained relationship with China. Consultancy firms with foreign ties have been victims of raids, detentions and arrests in China in recent months. Chinese officials have made it clear that they view export controls as a threat. The Chinese embassy in Washington, which is adopting the stage used by US officials to criticize Beijing, this week warned the Group of 7 against what it called “economic coercion.”

Mr Xi issued a similar rebuke to Mr Biden in Bali last fall. He pointed to the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union support withdrawn for China’s nuclear program.

China’s nuclear research continued, Mr Xi said, and four years later it detonated its first nuclear bomb.