In recent years, YA (young adult) literature, defined as texts written or produced for adolescents and marketed directly to teens, has been expected to challenge readers’ perceptions of social issues which might not previously have been considered appropriate for young readers. Irish YA texts have, until recently, been singularly slow to respond to such expectations, but more recent Irish YA texts have addressed subjects such as female sexuality, reproductive freedom, child abuse and, as will be discussed here, discrimination and the asylum-seeking process. This chapter studies how two recent Irish YA texts tackle inward migration to Ireland, and in particular the experiences of young female asylum seekers as they navigate Ireland’s at times inhospitable asylum application process. YA fiction may seem a particularly appropriate genre for an exploration of this theme, as the teenage years involve a developing understanding of power structures, with teenagers experiencing and attempting to come to terms with their own disempowerment. The gap between one’s own powerlessness and the power of the authorities one comes face-to-face could hardly be greater than in the situation of young female refugees and asylum seekers, who are the protagonists of the two texts under study here: Sinéad Moriarty’s The New Girl, which won the An Post Irish Book Award for Teen and Young Adult Book of the Year in 2021, and Jane Mitchell’s Run for Your Life (2022), described as the first children’s book exploring Direct Provision, as it foregrounds the disempowerment experienced by residents in Direct Provision, and the role Direct Provision plays in keeping asylum seekers in a place of powerlessness. While both of these texts present a diversity of characters, neither of the authors belong to the minorities they speak on behalf of. This chapter will conclude by asking how close Ireland is to achieving the aims of #weneeddiversebooks.