Haley’s immigration record isn’t what Trump says
History of tough restrictions belies his political attacks
Former President Donald Trump and his allies have spent weeks painting Nikki Haley as a bleeding heart on immigration as he seeks to dispatch her as his last remaining rival for the 2024 Republican nomination.
In Trump’s telling, Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and the daughter of Indian immigrants, is a “globalist” who flip-flopped on her support for Trump’s hard-line policies before she served as his ambassador to the United Nations. Ahead of a showdown between the two candidates in South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 24, his surrogates have accused her of being a secret liberal who supports open borders and won’t do enough to curb the flows of migrants and refugees into the nation.
But it’s a portrait nearly 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 legislation; the conservative religious leaders who were disappointed with 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 support for legal immigration when her party shifted its focus toward more extreme immigration cuts.
Larry Grooms, a South Carolina state senator who in 2011 helped lead the passage of the immigration restrictions Haley now promotes on the trail, said it has been disheartening to hear Republican colleagues who were in the trenches with him on that law now take part in Trump’s attacks against her on the issue.
“It was one of the toughest battles that I ever fought in the Legislature, and if it wasn’t for Nikki Haley rolling up her sleeves and pushing the ball, it would have not passed,” he said, calling distortions of her record wrong and “unfair.” He has endorsed Haley.
From the time she entered politics in 2004, Haley has held views on immigration that have remained largely consistent, according to a review of her past statements, legislative record and interviews with both supporters and detractors. She has long been in favor of improving legal pathways to the United States, while aggressively curbing illegal ones. And she often frames her beliefs in her own origins.
“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 affluent lives in India before eventually migrating to Canada and the United States, though she and her staff have declined to provide details.
As a state lawmaker in 2008, Haley backed legislation that made South Carolina the first state to explicitly prohibit students lacking permanent legal status from enrolling in public colleges and universities.
But it was the tough immigration measures she signed in 2011 that pushed 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 was fueling a broader wave of crackdowns across the Sun Belt just as states in the Deep South were seeing a rise in their small Latino populations.
The South Carolina measures, which were modeled after the strict “show-me-your-papers” law in Arizona and went virtually just as far, prompted a lawsuit from the Obama administration while fueling concerns that it would encourage racial and ethnic profiling of Latinos. It also barred professional licenses for immigrants living in the country illegally, keeping even those who attended private or out-ofstate colleges from some professions in the state.
In 2015, Haley faced a backlash from local Republicans for supporting the efforts of faith groups to resettle people in South Carolina.
She eventually took an aggressive stance against resettling Syrians in her state after terror attacks in Paris that same year, citing gaps in intelligence that could make the vetting process difficult.
The next year, Haley delivered the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address. She urged against following “the siren call of the angriest voices” and extended a welcoming hand to immigrants who follow the rules — a move many of her Republican critics still see as a rebuke of Trump’s demonizing rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Lee Bright, a former state senator who is unaligned in the 2024 race, contended that Haley was more conservative on the issue when she entered the state House but seemed to become more liberal with time.
During the debate over Syrian refugees, he recalled, she was said to have doomed the prospects of one bill that would have held relief organizations liable for violent acts committed in the U.S. by anyone they sponsored.
Now, he argues, Haley is taking more credit than she deserves for the hard-line legislation that Republican state lawmakers had written.
“President Trump is exactly right,” he said, she is “a flip-flopper.”
Campaigning in her home state, Haley has been more forcefully firing back against attacks on her record, though she is facing an uphill battle.
Trump, who continues to dominate by double digits in South Carolina polls, has more than 80 current and former Republican state officials endorsing his campaign, including Gov. Henry McMaster and Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.
In recent days, she has argued that as she was signing that 2011 legislation, Trump was “still a New York liberal” donating to Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris. She has called him “irresponsible” for his recent intervention in a Republican-led immigration deal in Congress, stalling progress as the crisis at the border mounts.
She still expresses support for revamping legal immigration avenues, based on business needs and merit, and strengthening the asylum system that she says protects persecuted people such as the Afghan interpreters who aided her husband, Maj. Michael Haley, while he was overseas.
But her stances on illegal immigration have kept pace with the new conservative extremes of her party under Trump: She has expressed support for deploying the military against Mexican drug cartels, limiting birthright citizenship and sending millions of migrants back to their home countries.
She does back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which grants work permits and temporary legal status for 570,000 people brought into the United States as children.
But she calls it the “carrot” to the stick that must be used to push for a broader and more hard-line overhaul of immigration laws.