Hello, Victor Spiresau, one of the few new arrivals that photographers and MPs found off a New Year's Day flight from Romania. His moment of fame is over and he vanishes into the shadowlands of Britain's serf-labour force. He joins that great army of the underpaid to clean, care and cater. Briefly, he stood in Luton arrivals as a woolly-hatted emblem for a host of issues that reflect none too well on the state of Britain: anti-immigration fever, Europhobia, benefit-scrounging hysteria, a living reminder of our high unemployment, low pay, weak labour laws and slum housing epidemic.

He has been promised £8 an hour in a carwash, as much as he'd earn in a day back home. But there's a high risk he'll be cheated, adrift in a virtually unregulated, uninspected world of work. That's why so many of these jobs are advertised only in eastern Europe – and why British workers with families can't take them.

Eastern European politicians, angry at anti-migrant abuse, say their people only take jobs that lazy Brits refuse to do: it's the Brits who lounge around on benefits, not hard-working newcomers. Iain Duncan Smith agrees: the dependency culture is to blame. Why else do foreigners take jobs, not our unemployed? Last week Duncan Smith told the Mail (again) that those who make benefits their "lifestyle choice" face a crackdown with "no hiding place", to be sent to "full-time mandatory attendance centres" to spend 35 hours a week applying for jobs. The assumption is that if they won't do jobs that Romanians take, they must need the screw tightened and benefits sanctioned until they have no choice. Benefits distort the market – if the market rate is whatever cheating employers can get away with.

New arrivals are vulnerable. Take a look at the Tjobs.ro site, where UK agencies offer British work to Romanians. (It's quite easy to decipher: Romanian looks like Esperanto.) See these jobs for 18- to 24-year-olds, as "apprentices", who only need to be paid the apprentice rate of £2.68 an hour, not the £6.31 minimum wage. The ad offers hotel and catering work for Hilton Hotels, Chelsea Football Club, Marriott hotels, Abbey Care homes and many others. The pay? £650-£1,000 a month, or so it says. Travel and accommodation are provided – but would they be deducted? Would uniforms, travel time and equipment be deducted? Is it piece-work, is it zero hours? Those are commonplace tricks to bring pay far below the minimum wage.

Goodness knows where Victor Spiresau will live. He says his employer will accommodate him, but he may find himself crammed into a hot-bedding house, with 16 people sleeping in shifts. A single man for a short stay may bear it, but no one with a family could live that way. David Hanson, shadow home office minister, debating the immigration bill going through parliament, pulled out ads from the EasyPoland site for rates of pay for British jobs that are illegal: £5.93 an hour for an office worker, £6 for an industrial sewer, £5.80 for a carpenter, all reading ominously "Accommodation: must bring bedding". That site yesterday had an ad for a care assistant, charging £85 rent, with the familiar note: "Company owns the accommodation and will deduct from wages." In law, immigration minister Mark Harper told the Commons, only £34.37 a week can be deducted for accommodation – but who's inspecting?

A Home Office report last July on conditions for immigrants found widespread "poor quality, overcrowded accommodation, inflated rents … exploitation by unscrupulous landlords and a growing number of 'beds in sheds'". Half of councils report problems with private landlords and migrant workers, some sleeping in farm buildings, with fire officers warning about dangerous overcrowding. That's the life that lazy Brits refuse.

Inspection of both the minimum wage and rogue landlords is dismally weak. Councils, hit hard by cuts, fail to prosecute landlords. The minimum wage is barely enforced: officially, the ONS finds 299,000 jobs paid illegally less than the minimum wage, while the Low Pay Commission warns that sectors with most migrant workers have little enforcement. Only two people have been prosecuted over minimum pay in three years; 15 dairy farmers guilty of trafficking labour were fined just £300. HMRC, its budget cut by a quarter, has halved inspections but the government says there's no problem: "Workers affected should report the matter to the pay and work rights helpline and HMRC will investigate." What expert knowledge and what bravery would a Victor Spiresau need to do that?

I called Hilton hotels: yes, they've been employing from Romania for a while, nothing new this year. This ad for apprentices, they say, is from some agency, not directly from them. Five years ago Citizens UK campaigned hard to persuade Hilton to pay the living wage (in London now £8.80 an hour), with cleaners and chambermaids waving placards outside their hotels. Negotiations went well but, just before the deal was struck, Blackstone private equity seized the company and sacked those managers. Instead of a living wage, it's recruiting abroad and Citizens UK says it pays by the number of rooms cleaned, nigh impossible to clean enough rooms fast enough to earn the minimum wage. InterContinental did sign up to the living wage, as Olympic sponsor, but no major retailer yet: Citizens UK before Christmas demonstrated at John Lewis which, despite soaring profits, still won't pay a living wage to outsourced cleaners, mainly migrants.

Labour's pitch on immigration is counter-intuitive: enforce decent pay and conditions and fewer migrants will come. Once British people with families could afford to take those jobs, employers would lose any incentive to recruit cheap workers abroad. Stop bad employers undercutting decent pay with imported near-slave labour. As a message it may not quite work politically as it doesn't satisfy the gut fears of the Ukip-inclined, but it has the advantage of taking real action against a real problem. Labour's new determination to enforce minimum pay inspections and spread gangmaster legislation to construction and hospitality is more than welcome: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown adamantly refused both, appeasing employers with lax regulation.

Employers are to blame for importing so many of the unskilled, instead of hiring at home. The best favour tougher rules on pay and conditions to drive out cowboys who undercut good companies. A living wage imposed, for example, on all big supermarkets would work if they all had to pay the same. Almost all low-paid work is essential: a living wage would stop cheapskate employers scrounging off tax credits and importing what too often looks like serf-labour.