The Stranger In The Harvest

Ruth Gleaned In Our Fields

Walk through any Australian day and you are carried by people who came from somewhere else. The nurse on the night shift. The carer who washes and feeds your mother in the home. The student pulling coffees before a morning class. The young backpacker bent over a row of strawberries in the heat. We lean on them at our most tender hours, when we are old, or sick, or hungry, and most of the time we never learn their names.

Pauline Hanson looked at these people and counted a cost.

At the National Press Club she called migration a crisis and named overseas students a loss, asking, ‘Is that what the electorate wants or supports?’ Her ledger is simple. The newcomer is a burden. The country would be richer, safer, more itself, with fewer of them.

The tradition she claims for this country keeps a different ledger. It opens with a foreign harvest worker, and it counts her as a blessing.

The Woman Who Gleaned

Her name was Ruth, and she was a Moabite, a foreigner from the wrong side of the border. She came to Israel with nothing, a widow following her widowed mother-in-law, and she went into the fields to work. She gleaned. She gathered the grain the harvesters left at the edges.

That grain was hers by law. ‘When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field … you shall leave them for the poor and the alien’ (Leviticus 19:9-10, NRSVue). God had written the stranger into the harvest. A portion of every field belonged to the newcomer, not as charity but as right.

Ruth worked, and she was welcomed, and Boaz the landowner told his men to leave extra for her on purpose. She married into the people who had every reason to shut her out. And then the story does something Hanson’s ledger does not survive. Ruth, the foreign harvest worker, became the great-grandmother of King David, and through him she stands in the family tree of Jesus himself (Matthew 1:5).

The migrant in the field was not a cost to the nation. She was woven into its bloodline. The tradition Hanson invokes does not warn against the stranger in the harvest. It traces its own salvation back to her.

The Gifts She Calls A Cost

Bring the old story to the present, and the figures tell it again.

The skilled migrant gives far more to this country than they take. Over a lifetime they pay around $319,000 more into the budget than they draw out (Treasury, 2021), while the population as a whole, on average, is a net cost (Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, 2025). The people Hanson calls a drain are quietly paying for the services the rest of us use.

Look at who holds our most tender hours. More than half of the workers in residential aged care were born overseas (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2024). More than four in ten of our nurses and carers were born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). When you are old, the hand steadying you will most likely belong to someone who came from somewhere else.

And the students she names as a loss are the beginning of the same workforce. International education is one of the country’s largest earnings from the world (Department of Education, 2026), and the graduate becomes the nurse, the engineer, the doctor a decade on (Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025). Today’s overseas student is tomorrow’s carer. Hanson looks at the front of the line and sees only a cost.

When you are old, the hand steadying you will likely have come from somewhere else. (Credit: Consumer.org.nz.)

The Harvest She Does Not See

There is one group of newcomers Hanson does not mention at all, and the silence is telling.

Each year around 200,000 young people come on a working holiday, most of them from Britain, Ireland and Europe (Department of Home Affairs, 2026). They are Ruth in the field. They come, they work, they fund their own way, and most of them leave when the season ends. Their labour is the equivalent of 16,000 full-time workers a year (Department of Home Affairs, 2024). In some districts they are up to nine in ten of the people picking the crop (National Farmers Federation, 2020).

She does not warn about them. They are not the migration she fears, because they look like the country she imagines. Yet they do exactly what she says the newcomer will not do. They work the harvest and ask for little. The objection was never about the work at all.

The scripture has a hard word for how we treat these workers. ‘You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy labourers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land’ (Deuteronomy 24:14-15, NRSVue). And James is blunter still. ‘The wages of the labourers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out’ (James 5:4, NRSVue). The temporary worker in the field is the easiest person in the country to underpay, and too often we have. How a nation treats the stranger in its harvest is a test it keeps failing.

There is a warning in the harvest too. When we drive the worker from the field, the field does not feed us. When the border closed in the pandemic and the backpackers stopped coming, fruit rotted on the ground and tens of millions of dollars of food was lost (Barry et al., 2024). The same is unfolding now in the United States, where a campaign to remove migrant workers has left crops unharvested, and the government’s own labour department has admitted local workers will not fill the rows (United States Department of Labor, 2025). ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few’ (Matthew 9:37, NRSVue). Send the labourers away, and the harvest is lost.

They are Ruth in the field. They come, work, and mostly leave. (Credit: ABC Rural / Jennifer Nichols.)

The Ledger Heaven Keeps

Hanson keeps a ledger of cost. She tallies the newcomer as a debit and the nation as poorer for them.

Heaven keeps a different book. In it the stranger in the harvest is not a burden but a blessing, written into the field by command, paid her wage as a right, welcomed into the family, traced into the bloodline of the Saviour. ‘You shall love the alien as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:34, NRSVue).

The nurse on the night shift, the carer, the student, the backpacker bent over the strawberries. They pay in more than they draw. They hold us when we are weak. They bring in the harvest we will not bring in ourselves. The country is not poorer for them. It is fed, and nursed, and carried by them.

Ruth gleaned in our fields, and the tradition Hanson claims called her blessed. We would do well to remember whose story this is, and which way its ledger runs.

Sources

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2022, October 12). A caring nation: 15 per cent of Australia’s workforce in health care and social assistance. https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/caring-nation-15-cent-australias-workforce-health-care-and-social-assistance-industry

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2024). Aged care workforce. https://www.gen-agedcaredata.gov.au/topics/aged-care-workforce

Barry, K., Petrou, A., & Schwartz, A. (2024). From tourists to essential workers: The presence of backpackers in rural Queensland. Geoforum. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016724002730

Department of Education. (2026). Education export income, calendar year 2025. https://www.education.gov.au/international-education-data-and-research/education-export-income-calendar-year

Department of Home Affairs. (2024). Working Holiday Maker program report. https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-statistics/statistics/visa-statistics/work/working-holiday-maker

Department of Home Affairs. (2026). Working Holiday visa (subclass 417) and Work and Holiday visa (subclass 462). https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-listing/work-holiday-417

Jobs and Skills Australia. (2025). International students outcomes and pathways study. https://www.jobsandskills.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-09/international_students_pathways_and_outcomes_study_report.pdf

National Farmers Federation. (2020). Horticulture workforce statistics. https://nff.org.au/

Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. (2025, March 18). Social cohesion insights 05: Support for immigration. https://scanloninstitute.org.au/publications/insights/social-cohesion-insights-05-support-immigration/

Treasury. (2021). The lifetime fiscal impact of the Australian permanent migration program. https://treasury.gov.au/publication/p2021-220773

United States Department of Labor. (2025, October). H-2A program rule and labour market findings. https://www.dol.gov/

Biblical quotations from the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition (NRSVue), with spelling rendered in Australian English.