Fearless Leader
Donor
In order to get some more South American ideas going here's an idea based off my travails in the British National Archives. From my observations (not thorough ones mind you, I was looking for something else...) it seemed to me that there was a persistent effort from at least1923 to 1939 to settle refugees in the interior of British Guyana.
Filled with arable land suitable for farming and ranching, valuable hardwood, as well as mineral wealth, the Guyanan hinterland is sparsely populated to this day, mostly due to it's extreme inaccessibility. Simply put the possible benefits of settling refugees in the region were outweighed by the extreme costs associated with getting them there and sustaining them. All of the various refugee resettlement plans (Assyrian, Armenian, Jewish) floundered upon this problem.
IMO in order to get widespread settlement of refugees in Guyana, you'll need to solve this problem at just the right time and even then it's going to be touchy given domestic interests. Enter governor William Egerton apparently he proposed a railway to Brazil as a way of opening up the Guyanan interior in 1914. Now rightfully so, nobody saw this as a good idea. But people can be dumb. Let's say that he gets some decent marketing people on board and they manage to make this idea sound infinitely less terrible than it actually is. He somehow raises the money, and construction begins prior to WWI (Maybe one of the earlier plans go through as a way to avert having the money being siphoned off for WWI?).
Anyways, in TTL construction bogs down due to various difficulties, and the Guyanan railway quickly becomes a "bridge to nowhere". Yet WWI's coming to an end and all of a sudden the foreign and colonial office start bouncing around ideas to settle refugees in the region as a means to spur development. Just like in OTL, Armenian and Assyrian refugees from the Ottoman Empire are prime suspects for this plan and they're given a deal. They're to be shipped over to Guyana where they will help extend the railroad in exchange for land and rights to settle there. In order to raise funds for all of this, the railroad is cast as a humanitarian effort and for the sake of argument the money comes in.
Plausible?
How many refugees do you think would take up the offer? How many could be settled in the region?
Filled with arable land suitable for farming and ranching, valuable hardwood, as well as mineral wealth, the Guyanan hinterland is sparsely populated to this day, mostly due to it's extreme inaccessibility. Simply put the possible benefits of settling refugees in the region were outweighed by the extreme costs associated with getting them there and sustaining them. All of the various refugee resettlement plans (Assyrian, Armenian, Jewish) floundered upon this problem.
IMO in order to get widespread settlement of refugees in Guyana, you'll need to solve this problem at just the right time and even then it's going to be touchy given domestic interests. Enter governor William Egerton apparently he proposed a railway to Brazil as a way of opening up the Guyanan interior in 1914. Now rightfully so, nobody saw this as a good idea. But people can be dumb. Let's say that he gets some decent marketing people on board and they manage to make this idea sound infinitely less terrible than it actually is. He somehow raises the money, and construction begins prior to WWI (Maybe one of the earlier plans go through as a way to avert having the money being siphoned off for WWI?).
Anyways, in TTL construction bogs down due to various difficulties, and the Guyanan railway quickly becomes a "bridge to nowhere". Yet WWI's coming to an end and all of a sudden the foreign and colonial office start bouncing around ideas to settle refugees in the region as a means to spur development. Just like in OTL, Armenian and Assyrian refugees from the Ottoman Empire are prime suspects for this plan and they're given a deal. They're to be shipped over to Guyana where they will help extend the railroad in exchange for land and rights to settle there. In order to raise funds for all of this, the railroad is cast as a humanitarian effort and for the sake of argument the money comes in.
Plausible?
How many refugees do you think would take up the offer? How many could be settled in the region?