User:Forerunner/Anti-colonial sentiment

Anti-colonial sentiment is a common element of life on mid-26th Century Earth and the Inner Colonies. It is the distrust of colonially-born humans, particularly those in the Outer Colonies, and may involve actual discrimination. Brought on by a century of poor relations between Earth and the Outer Colonies, it was very easy for anyone accepting its existence to see it everywhere in society.

Background
After two centuries of colonization within the Sol System, colony ships such as the Odyssey brought humanity's best and brightest to other systems and founded colonies like Reach. Over time they were built up as booming metropoles with strong social and economic infrastructures. By 2390 there grew a need for foods and materials to maintain these worlds, and the Outer Colonies were established to fulfill these needs.

As a result of these differing ways of life, those settling in the Outer Colonies adopted frontiersman views and saw Earth as more of an annoyance in every way, to the extent that Earth food and drink were loathed by colonial tourists and migrants as overpriced and poor-tasting. While admired by many, actual visitors to Earth started a joke that it was named due to being a dump. With an underfunded UNSC focusing its anti-pirate activities to Inner Colony space, it was left with the Colonial Military Administration to keep the other worlds safe, establishing planetary militias populated entirely by locals. With the Outer Colonies drifting further and further into disunity, political campaigns began in the mid-25th century to secure full legislative independence from Earth, with a popular argument arising that all colonies were supposed to be independent. Due to problems this would have for Inner worlds, Earth refused to grant greater autonomy, eventually leading to a series of colonial revolutions and rebellions known as the Insurrection.

Human-Covenant War
When the Human-Covenant war began, the Inner Colony viewpoint had become so consumed by three decades of conflict the UNSC willingly pulled ships back from the Outer Colonies elsewhere. In response to this unpopular decision, Insurrectionist groups committed themselves to evacuating their fellow citizens when their worlds were individually attacked; Madrigal for example was evacuated by its local Insurrectionists and its people settled in the nearby asteroid field.

Contributing to the UNSC's reluctance to protect these colonies was the Earth view of the war with the Covenant was that it was more of an Outer Colonies situation. According to Benjamin Giraud, many of its population were divorced from the very concept of total human genocide, until at least news of Reach's glassing came in if not the Covenant attack on Earth itself. It should be noted that Earth was committed to immigration law throughout this conflict with no significant alterations being made, allowing a large black market to flourish for people from words such as Coral to have a new life on Earth. Immigration legislation was restrictive enough that colonies who's entry visas were refused could be detained in camps as illegal aliens, even if their world of origin no longer existed. A common term for such people was "refuse", a play-on-words of "refugee" showing how little they were wanted on Earth.

Known examples

 * Upon the war's end, mining corporations began moving into the destroyed colonies and recycled crumbling buildings as resources for Inner Colony worlds. Despite the possibility of any product containing the remains of glassed people, the mining companies still managed to make a fortune by labeling their products "organic".
 * As revealed by journalist Benjamin Giraud, there was a significant bias towards Outer Colony children when selecting candidates for the SPARTAN-II program.