The point is to make the expected ROI of trespassing in other nations' territorial waters negative. The crew is cheap and easy to replace relative to the boat. So you have to make the boat go away (sink it or impound it) to make the corporate owner back on land feel the heat.

Imprison them and give them back to their home country ASAP is probably the right way to handle the crew.

They may still run if accepting the paid vacation offer would be followed by imprisonment at home.

So offer them permanent residency instead. And then prepare for the logistics issue of managing a great fleet of boats racing straight to your ports.

Nations like ours with low birth rates and aging workforces depend on immigrants to maintain vibrant economies. The alternative is to become like Japan, where the economy stagnates and abandoned houses litter the countryside.

Immigration is generally not territorial dispute, indeed, its far more often voting for an alternate regime with one’s feet than asserting a hostile territorial claim.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

The problem with these rules, IMHO, is that they were created to serve the interests of western powers. Hard to force other countries to play by them, then.

Hell, we're witnessing in-your-face genocide of the Uighurs, takeover of Hong Kong, imminent takeover of Taiwan, support of North Korea's psychopathic regime, destruction of the environment in every way possible (as in this story), etc... and the rest of the world sits on its collective hands. China knows how to boil frogs nice and slowly.

The only way it turns to shoot-and-sink is if the boats flagrantly disregard orders through multiple points of escalation. Even then the attempt would be to disable the ship, not destroy it (by shooting out the engine or rudder, for example).

Fisherboats do not want to fight gun ships - and just retreat if they see, the threat is serious.

When the locals, for lack of a standing Navy, defend their waters, we call them pirates and send our Navy to fight them. No surprise, that these pirates went after bigger ships, realizing that being more profitable than fishing. Now imagine a world, in which our Navies would defend Somali waters against these intrusions. While at the same time, we did some real, like non-military, backes nation building through the UN. I guess that would have been a much better way to combat piracy there. But who gives a shit about some poor bastards in a failed state somewhere in Africa?

Further, and I say this as someone who prefers to err on the tough-on-crime side, it's unjust to punish the desperate when the wealthy are pulling the strings, raking in the profit, and bearing none of the risk.

So people do care about human rights.

But of course with hypocrisy - so we are quite nice - but we paid Gaddafi and now ergogan and morocco to do the dirty work to keep them away, so we can have more or less clean hands.

FWIW, this was nothing but a media circus. Trump largely continued immigration practices that existed under Obama and indeed Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama did in his first term, but under Obama everything was great and then under Trump they were “concentration camps” and kids were in cages and being separated from their family and America is a white supremacist hellscape and etc.

This doesn’t mean that the Us didn’t deserve its immigration-policy reckoning; only that Trump didn’t do anything to cause it except offend the media.

(for the rabid partisans out there, this one particular defense of Trump doesn’t imply that I’m a Trump supporter or that he doesn’t deserve criticism for other things, etc)

https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=7053

China accounts for 11% of Argentina’s exports. I’d imagine a lot of it is soy and maybe lithium.