If they flee, sink the ship.
They’ll catch on.
So how about:
Sell the ship, let the crew live in a nice hotel, book them a 1st class flight back home, then bill the country under who's flag the ship was operating. If they can't / refuse to pay, import sanctions.
That way, you're not punishing the crew, yet making such behavior financially uninteresting. That's the only way because the person who decided to send that ship there is probably far away and busy counting profits.
Also, it's a lot easier to capture the boat if that's a positive experience for the crew. They might flee from a trip to prison but few people run from a paid vacation offer.
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.
It would also have the nice side effect of dissuading countries to lend their flag to shady companies all over the world.
Realistically, once this becomes a strategem, and a known one, anyone with a boat can enter your waters, hoist the jolly roger, then say "Yeah, take me into asylum." And poof, your immigration procedures evaporate.
Aren't the vast majority of these actually "flags of convenience" and registered in Panama?
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.
Want to get rid of the fishing fleet? Make a credible offer of residency and amnesty to all their crews - no strings attached, no continued use as pawns in politics. Simple trade: they bring in and surrender their vessel, you give each a green card, a key to a room, some starting cash, and a "thank you for your service", and forget about them.
But OK, so let's scratch the "and forget about them" part. Have the counterintelligence agency keep their details in their database, and warn them that they won't get security clearance in the next decade or three. This won't discourage anyone who's eager to escape their home country.
"Dealing" with China is going to get a lot hotter. Period.
Or start using a bunch of them to sink for reef seeding.
Thats why navies exist.
You send a handful of frigates and bombers there and start sinking ships.
A few trawlers got boarded but no shots were fired.
Like any navy is supposed to.
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.
Thus uncontrolled migration can never be a solution to our population issues. Instead effort should be put into attracting more skilled workforce that is in demand, and they should come in legally.
There are competent engineers "waiting in line" for years, while illegals are allowed to stay... it's basically rewarding the criminals and punishing the honest ones.
Long story short, many people still want to have children, and not having fertility should be the problem that is getting addressed.
Male-female resentment is not the reason fertility rates around the globe have fallen precipitously over the past century. That's a bizarre idea.
When women have access to contraception and opportunities to participate in the workforce and pursue higher education, it turns out they are less interested in raising large families.
There are tools we could be using to encourage people to have more children, such as universal childcare and pre-K, generous financial support for low-income families, and high quality public schools. Unfortunately, opponents to immigration typically also oppose these policies, too.
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.
It would be better to fight the defacto slavery of the crews (agencies, owners and so on), the abysmal conditions in these crews home countries and sanction the hell out the owners of these ships and the people / companies making a healthy profit from them. But why bother, because you would just end up with more expensive shipping im general and more expensive fish.
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.
The "our bastard" doctrine was an idiocy on massive scale, and continues to be one.
The West has bred all the snakes in the snake pit they ended up in now itself.
> "He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."
There is no yours, or their bastards, there are just bastards.
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).
This feels like a way to get into a game of "you can't be everywhere at once".
Fisherboats do not want to fight gun ships - and just retreat if they see, the threat is serious.
I assume self-preservation instinct kicks in after the first instance of someone calling your bluff, but it can't really be helped.
Trained giant squid and dolphins would be the next impractical idea.
Final option: pull a Captain Nemo.
Putting the inner 10 year old away now.
Really the only nation that can stop this is China.
One narrative concerning piracy off the coast of Somalia is that incursion of foreign fishing fleets took away the opportunity for lawful livelihoods for those living in Somalia. Which in the context of this post is ... troublingly ironic.
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?