Internationalist descriptions of displaced communities often comment on their statistical youthfulness as an indicator of a basic problem – sometimes worrying about young people’s high levels of need, but more often unreflectively associating youth, in itself, with the potential for social disruption and various kinds of radicalism. This talk explores how young people in refugee situations have unwittingly become a venue for the expression of broad political anxieties mostly derived from domestic realities across the Global North, and seeks to contrast such rhetoric with the demonstrable reality that refugee youth placed in receptive host societies actually often emerge as resettlement’s major success stories.