请将“Such practices of debt bondage combine many things: expectations of a good life in the United States and the related opportunity to support relatives at home, the pursuit of profits in the international human trafficking industry, the sealing off of national borders, and the willingness of employers to exploit the fact that their workers wishing to flee can only do so at the risk of their lives. Immigration laws determine working and living conditions on the margins of capitalist societies.
Seventh Theoretical Remark: States and Their Margins
People living on the margins of societies have been present in capitalist societies since capitalist forms of production became dominant. (That they also existed in earlier and other societies can and must be left out of consideration here.) Conditions of life at the margins of capitalist societies were and are not exclusively caused by market forces, nor are they exclusively determined by poverty. Discrimination is ripe at the margins of metropolitan capitalist countries. Whoever becomes needy in one of these countries will also come under the control of the state. In capitalist societies, aid is officially made conditional upon proof of willingness to work for wages, even when there is insufficient demand for labour in a society. Although the acceptance of state support today no longer results in restrictions on civil rights, those receiving support still cannot escape the potential control of their lifestyle. This notwithstanding, all citizens formally have the same rights.
This does not apply to foreigners. If they are wealthy or highly favoured on labour markets due to special qualifications, their legal inequality need not affect their everyday lives. If, however, they are forced to compete for jobs under harsh conditions, their existence on the fringes of a society is shaped not only by racism, discrimination, unlimited exploitation and the ensuing scarcity, but also by having fewer rights. This state’s definition of the margins is in a sense the counterpart to the state’s social policy.
Unbounded Exploitation ‘Offshore’
Unlike migrant workers, most people who work under ‘offshore’ conditions remain in the country of birth. If they are employed ‘offshore’, however, they henceforth work in an area that is legally separate from this country, in a ‘fictitious’ state.
At present, there is hardly any patch of land on earth that is not part of a nation state.130 In this territorially ordered world, national borders mark the respective territory of a sovereign state. Until a few decades ago, these bordered areas were identical with the scope of applicability of the respective national law. This had not always been the case. Before capitalism, rulers often granted special privileges to foreign traders;'1-’0 in the first capitalist states, women and members of some religious communities had fewer rights, and in the colonies all the natives had fewer rights. In none of these political entities could the unity 
of the territorial legal space be equated with the equality of the inhabitants before the law. However, foreigners who took on economic activities in colonies were also subject to the laws of the colonial state in question. There were often formal exceptions for criminal laws, and additional factual exceptions for all other laws. Nevertheless, the establishment of colonial state power turned capital owners who came from the motherland or another foreign country into capitalists of the concerned colony.132 And this situation still applies today, whenever capital owners invest under the law applicable in a state. By threatening to withdraw their capital, they can try to pressure the state into adopting certain laws and the authorities into applying leniency in their enforcement, but this situation is not fundamentally different from that in the metropolitan capitalist countries.
In the phase of globalisation, however, the previous identity of national territory and legal area has now been dissolved by governments of sovereign states using their sovereign rights to create derogations from national laws, thereby constituting enclaves of national legal spaces. These offshore conditions of law133 have become central spaces for the functioning of globalised capitalism. Unlike in earlier phases of capitalism, capital invested under offshore conditions remains foreign capital. This is because offshore means that investors are offered a legal space separate from the national legal space. Some national laws also apply offshore, but overall capitalism prevails there in a rather non-domesticated form. As far as the state that created these conditions is concerned, capital owners who use them operate legally.
Most offshore areas have been created in developing countries,'1-14 sometimes at the instigation of interested parties in the metropolitan capitalist states. They have been accepted by their governments as a means of facilitating international activities for local capitalists. Legal systems offering consistency between metropolitan capitalist states and now formally independent states have facilitated the use of offshore conditions. However, most offshore areas are not direct offshoots of the governmental competencies of metropolitan capitalist states, but instead put the national sovereignty of less developed countries to good use. In order to attract investors, distinctly favourable conditions are marketed on the world offshore services market.135
Initially, access to offshore conditions for investment was reserved to foreign investors almost everywhere. In the meantime, this restriction has been liberalised in many places. If capital is invested under offshore conditions, it becomes quasi-stateless, which of course does not prevent profits from being transferred to the country where the investor is domiciled.
A central function of offshore centres is to create opportunities for tax avoid-ance and money laundering with illegally acquired funds.
Until the 1990s, criticism of these practices expressed in the metropolitan capitalist states was more or less lip service, because governments of developed capitalist societies valued the possibility of offshore areas being used to favour their national companies. As globalisation developed, the importance of financial centres grew (Johns and Le Marchant 1993, pp. 1-3). New communication systems, but equally the development of ever more differentiated and complex structures of the financial markets have favoured this development, but their motor has been the engagement of governments of industrialised countries in competition with other industrialised countries to deregulate so as to keep capital in the country or to bring additional capital into the country.136
Although offshore financial centres can be used to convert profits obtained through violent practices into legal capital, (although in many countries regular local banks can also be used for such money laundering), we shall not discuss offshore areas as financial centres. Instead, I will use the examples of the Flags of Convenience (FOCS) and Export Processing Zones (EPZS) to explain how 
offshore conditions are made use of to exploit the use of labour without the hindrance of the regulations that have been fought for in countries of domesticated capitalism.137 But this practice is not without repercussions on labour markets in developed countries. Along with the worldwide competition for investment, the competition for paid labour has also been globalised.
Flags of Convenience
International agreements, most recently the Law of the Sea adopted by the UN in 1982, have established the high seas as an area beyond all national sovereign rights. Any ship flying the flag of a sovereign state is entitled to sail the high seas with peaceful intent. A ship’s flag indicates in which state a ship is registered and, consequently, to which national laws (and controls) the operation of a ship is subject. Since the beginning of globalisation, more and more ships have been sailing under the flag of a state in which the company operating them exists merely as a letter-box company and in which the profits generated by their operation are not accrued. Such use of flags (more precisely: ship registers) is not new,138 but since the end of the 1970s, registering a ship in a state that offers a Flag of Convenience has become a common business management method in world merchant shipping. This practice is a direct consequence of the crisis (described above). The stagnation of world trade, which had previously grown 
steadily and considerably, hit shipping all the more seriously because many new ships had been ordered during the boom and were delivered in the middle of the crisis. For oil tankers, which had previously become increasingly numerous and larger, freight was hardly to be found after the price hikes by opec and the stagnating demand for raw materials. Whereas before the crisis secondhand ships had been traded on the world market at prices that virtually corresponded to their construction costs, these prices collapsed during the crisis years. This was a very favourable situation for new entrants from countries that had not previously been among the world’s leading shipping nations. Quite a few of the new shipowners hired officers from the traditional maritime states who had not found employment during the crisis. The ships they now commanded were manned by seafarers who had previously had little experience in global maritime transport. This new competition jacked up overall pressure on costs. Shipowners in traditional maritime states tried to push ahead with technical developments that could be used to save on personnel. But everywhere, cuts in the number of crew members exceeded the technical reduction of the workload. This was of little help against intensified international competition.
In this situation, more and more shipowners started to register individual ships, first in secret but then quite openly, in states which offered particularly favourable conditions: low registration fees, no or very low taxes, a guarantee of anonymity, no rules on crew numbers and on the certificates that ship managements had to produce, few checks on safety facilities and, above all, no rules on the nationality of crews and their pay. The offer of a Flag of Convenience made and still makes it legally possible to employ seafarers from all over the world at the wages agreed in their countries of origin. For seafarers who had previously sailed under long-established flags, this meant that they could no longer compete in the maritime labour market. Instead, seafarers were and are now hired from countries where candidates are willing to accept low wages. They work and live in a no man’s land (Gerstenberger and Welke 2004/2008, chapter 2). The ship on which they work has only a fictitious relation with the state whose flag it is flying.139 If the state has a port at all, the ship will most likely never moor there. And this also means that seafarers never have the chance to refer 
to the labour law regulations that may exist in the flag state. Outflagged ships are not covered by national labour protection rights. Not only that, but traditions that used to regulate day-to-day work on ships no longer exist. Seafarers who are often hardly able to talk with each other are expected not only to operate complicated technical equipment, but also to cope in an artificially created community from which there is often no interruption for months on end.”翻译为中文