With the additional side question of “how many hypomeiones are you going to have to funnel through therapy programs”?
Yeah, that’s a bit of a different issue. After all, in ad/an situations generally you get the whole polity as part of the deal, and so you can’t really pull an “except those assholes”. Or if you do, it’s something you sort out in the early stages such that as part of this deal, your asshole secessionist movement gets to be seceded, belike.
Suffice it to say that if y’all have an asshole problem that would require fences and sentry guns, y’all or at least that chunk of y’all don’t get to be admitted, or even annexed. The best you can hope for is the kind of satrapy more accurately described as “involuntary protectorate”, in which case you get to be policed in detail by surveillance dust and security drones from the Bitterness-class involuntary protectorate enforcer orbiting 'way overhead, and may very rarely even see an actual Imperial unless Admiral Cluster Bomb is feeling chatty.
So what is this status intended for?
Well, it’s to deal with those admissions and annexations where they’re happy to take the polity, but there are those certain minority sections of society which while not in themselves a violent insurrection are nonetheless insistent that the Wehrmacht/IJA Did Nothing Wrong, or our contemporary Team War Crimes & Genocide Are Perfectly Fine When Our Side Do Them.
(I mean, on the one hand, the galaxy would probably be a better place if they all spontaneously dropped dead tomorrow, but, y’know, ethics.)
And its practical effects?
Well, they can’t deport you simply for being a hypomeion. After all, having admitted or annexed your former polity does rather concede your right to live in it.
(That said: when a citizen-shareholder commits a felony, having thus grossly violated the responsibilities of citizen-shareholdership, per the Charter, they lose said citizen-shareholdership, becoming a resident with a -D “disenfranchised” SI, although able to maintain Imperial domicile.
But that can only apply to citizen-shareholders, since you can’t take away from people what they don’t have. Resident non-citizen-shareholders - be they the mainstream of domiciled or transient -R "resident"s without other qualification, or one of the other non-minor resident categories [disenfranchised, incapable, proscriptee, metic, or hypomeion] are thus deported as personae non gratae under the circumstances. So it does lower the threshold at which the Empire will declare that it is officially done with hosting your bullshit.)
In terms of actual civic rights inaccessible to hypomeiones: well, the aspects of those which recapitulate in more wordy forms fundamental rights can’t be taken away anyway, and while in theory there are things they could clamp down on in re speech, assembly, association, travel, etc. - see article IV here, and remember that any such clamping down can’t violate the fundamental rights - in practice is is extremely disinclined to do so. The power exists, but using it in anything except the most extreme circumstances would be a profound violation of Imperial values that wouldn’t be accepted by, well, anyone. I don’t think it’s ever happened, and if it did, it was only at the margins.
There are two notable exceptions here.
One is the right of arms, which bearing in mind Imperial culture in general is about as blunt and symbolically visible a statement of “you are not worthy of admission into our circle of trust” as you might imagine.
(The primary effect of this is social, as you might imagine, because it makes what the Empire as a collective of citizen-shareholders thinks of you real clear even to people who didn’t notice the -H tag at the end of your SI.)
The other relevant one is article XIV, rights of genesis, because as you may recall the Empire doesn’t consider reproduction an unlimited right insofar as it necessarily involves someone else, even if reproduction for your species is just sparkling mitosis.
As mentioned, the powers granted by the fifth amendment that added article XIV permit the regulation of reproduction where matters of public health and child welfare were concerned, and the same factors which make people hypomeiones rather than metics qualify pretty well as “unfit parents, unfit circumstances” by the standards of the Reproductive Statutes.
So, to sum up, its essential effect is to apply the weight of social opprobrium to you until you either get your act together, get out (of your own will, and not letting the door hit you on the ass on your way), or get dead. Any of the above is acceptable.
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I have to ask, I think. Whereabouts do undesirables who have reached the deportation stage get deported to?
One presumes if there was a place of origin with a spaceport with Imperial extrality, you could land them there then shove them over the border, and if the origin didn’t want them back they could shoot their own damn dog. And if the origin didn’t have a spaceport you could pick a handy patch of urban outskirts and then use an armed shuttle and crew to put them there. And if they came from Space™ you could, well, space them, put them in a suit and shove them out of the policed volumes of the habitat.
But there are many edge cases that aren’t those, including ones where there wasn’t an origin.
Rim Free Zone?
As I’ve probably said at one time or another, there’s always gotta be an Outside.
(There was a deliberately-maintained one for all those years when the Empire covered the entire homeworld, and should the Empire ever grow to cover the entire galaxy, there’ll be some planets set aside for precisely the same reason.)
In terms of the practicalities of deportation, as a general courtesy, you receive the opportunity to purchase a ticket to any destination willing to accept you.
(There is bound to be at least one, given that if your crime was all that special they’d just have had you shot. Be it your original polity, or another¹, or one of many not-all-that-choosy freesoil worlds or new colonies, or if nowhere else, there are always places that want meat for the machine and aren’t too picky where they get it.)
On the rare occasions that doesn’t work out, well, there’s always the planet where all the lost people go. Freeze ‘em down, ship ‘em out.
tl;dr Like the song says, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
- The Free Zone is a popular choice, especially among people who think that no rulers is the same thing as no rules. This rarely works out well.
Yes, I think you mentioned at one point there was an island somewhere on Eliera.
Natural followup question would be, would the Conclave powers object if someone frozen down and shipped to March rose to supreme power and hegemony and united the planet?
I somehow don’t think the Conclave Commission on Refuge-Seeking Sophonts includes the Empire, or if it did, they would mind. Unless it was Lord Blackfall.
Given that the population of Márch is divided into a large number of mutually hostile groups often self-selected for non-cooperation and general unsociability (including the not-small number who ended up there for picking fights with society and losing), I think the primary reaction of the Empire, and indeed the other Presidium powers, would be something pretty close to astonishment.
Especially since this hypothetical would have had to do it without running foul of the Commission’s “pruning would-be genocidaires from orbit” policy.
Once the astonishment wears off, the devil is in the details, but might well work out something along the lines of “hey, if you think you can make something of this tar-pit, you’re welcome to it; we can get another and maybe the naïve idealism will work this time”.
Lady Blackfall (Lord Blackfall’s beautiful and sinister daughter) likes a challenge. More seriously, there has to be at least one Renegade who also likes a challenge and doesn’t want to get hunted down by the Fourth Directorate.
I can see why the Commission would have that policy. Given the level of naive idealism, do they conflate it with a policy of, “Xe’s killed N people in the last week, xe must be evil, wrong and bad”?
The problem here is that the challenge, even if you carry it through successfully, doesn’t get you anything worth having.
I mean, congratulations. You’ve successfully dominated a marginal planet, with no economy, culture, or technology worth speaking of, whose non-transient population are the ones that no immigration officer, merc recruiter, or indenture broker is prepared to bother with, and half of whom want to knife the other half in the back over crumbs, territory, or the disputes that brought them here in the first place.
The galaxy’s largest slum is yours to command, pace all the faithful followers with plans to slit your throat the moment it becomes convenient - “sad little king of a sad little hill”, to steal a quote.
Yeah, fair point. If there’s nothing there at all but dregs, and the dregs can’t be improved, and the people born as descendents of the dregs are equally inevitably dregs, and equally inevitably impossible to improve or help improve themselves, then I suppose leaving them to fester, or burning the entire compost heap to nice sterile ash, are the two options left.
If you can’t filter a core of decent people out of the population there, it’s very true you couldn’t build an economy or culture or industrial/technology base using the people you don’t have. And if importing the requisite knowledge in your neural lace when you take ship to Sanctuary isn’t enough to turn that around, it isn’t.
If there are merc recruiting points and indenture recruiting points set up near Sanctuary that are taking whatever anomalously non-dreg people want out and meet their standards, I suppose that’s all that can be expected.
I withdraw the speculation, you win.
Look.
In fanon, you can do whatever you want. In headcanon, even.
But in canon, Sanctuary’s sorting mechanisms and Márch proper exist as Purgatorio and Inferno, if you will, to represent the theme that it is actually necessary to participate in your own salvation¹, and if someone could come in from outside, go among the people who have slapped aside every hand reached out to them, and somehow defeat the paralyzing, consumptive self-absorption, etc., of spiritual entropy that caused them to do that, it wouldn’t work.
And if people couldn’t damn themselves or could be saved from outside against their own self-destructive will, it would completely screw up the thematics of the entire ‘verse’s underlying Cosmomachy, belike.
Which is why, Doylistically, it has to be the way it is.
- It’s, by design, a transit camp. Every facility in Sanctuary is designed to find you somewhere to go. All you have to do be willing and not horrible.
- Also, I’m pretty sure outside the Sanctuary island region they’re doping the food drops with contraceptives, because good gods, people.
Don’t need fanon or headcanon, thanks. And I’m certainly not going to waste my time arguing with the person who writes the canon, about what is and isn’t canonical fact.
Does the Republic have one of these, or do they just dispose of such people to involuntary indenture or the disintegrator pits?