By Michael Leppert
The Indiana Citizen
July 23, 2025
It’s never been a matter of “if.” It has always been a matter of “when.”
Last week, GOP U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar of Florida, filed “The Dignity Act of 2025,” a bipartisan immigration reform package that would provide legal status for certain undocumented immigrants. She filed similar legislation in 2023, but the political climate has changed wildly since way back then. Unsurprisingly, the economic demand for migrant labor has not.
Donald Trump is now in the White House and the mass deportation initiative he promised is being implemented at breakneck speed. The masked raids by a growing masked army known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, are happening in unpredictable places all over the country. The impact of the sweeps, however, is as predictable as the sunrise.
What else has changed in politics? U.S. Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Indiana, recaptured Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District seat after Republican Jim Banks vacated the seat to run for the U.S. Senate. Stutzman is one of 10 GOP House members to sign onto the Dignity Act 2025, and that is no small gesture.
In normal times, of which these are certainly not, Stutzman’s co-sponsorship of legislation designed to protect the agricultural economy that dominates his district would make perfect sense. And make no mistake about it, the legislation is a far cry from what immigration hard liners could legitimately pan as an amnesty policy.
As reported by the Indianapolis Star, the bill “would provide legal status to undocumented immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, so long as they pass a criminal background check, pay a $7,000 fine across seven years and begin paying taxes. The bill would allow people with this status to stay indefinitely, though they would be ineligible for federal benefits.”
Documenting living in the U.S. for five years by an undocumented immigrant would seem to be the first challenge.
The second challenge is the “fine.” Is it really a fine? It seems more like an installment program for the purchasing of legal status. I can hear the sales pitch now: “For the low, low price of $1000 a year, you can live out your days as a farm worker in peace and prosperity.” ICE will be able to sort all of that out during their masked kidnappings, I’m sure.
MAGA loyalists are outraged about the Dignity Act, seeing it as a departure from what they voted for in 2024 and contrary to the Stephen Miller-based, deport-them-all approach.
But the legislation seems about as Trumpian a policy as, oh, I don’t know, the Trump Card. Remember that? This is a program that would allow investors to effectively buy a path to citizenship if they commit $5 million to projects in the U.S.
So, while Stutzman endures the backlash for allegedly being soft on immigration and contradictory to the unchallengeable one in the White House, it is important to point out how representative of his district his position actually is. Importantly, it appears to be the same place that now-Sen. Banks was in during his freshman year, representing the same district in the House eight short years ago.
During an interview in 2017, Banks was a stock conservative from northeast Indiana and was only taking orders from his constituents. The interview was given at least a year before he made the distinct decision to join the sycophancy of the Trump regime.
Molly Ball, reporting for The Atlantic in a long form article on the then-new House member asked him about immigration. She reported, “(Banks) said he didn’t like Trump’s rhetoric, and that this region would need an influx of immigrants to remain economically viable.”
Nothing meaningful has changed in the district specifically or in the agriculture labor market generally since then.
I don’t love the Dignity Act, but if passed, the situation here would likely be better than where we are headed. It is ludicrous to believe that removing immigrant labor from the agriculture sector will not decimate that industry, skyrocketing the prices of its products, and from there, a litany of unknown negative impacts.
Never mind the absurd fantasies of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that American citizens will fill the job vacancies created by the ICE raids. No, they won’t. The market for migrant labor exists because of that fact.
Without migrant labor, crops will rot in the field. Businesses will wither. Dinner plates will become empty. And importantly for the discussion of the Dignity Act, northeast Indiana will cease to be, in the words of Sen. Banks, “economically viable.”
Stutzman crossed the line, I guess. He did that one thing that not many expect him or any other Republican in congress to do these days: his job.
Michael Leppert is an author, educator and a communication consultant in Indianapolis. He writes about government, politics and culture at MichaelLeppert.com. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
