THOUSANDS of students are sitting idly at home for the summer holidays because east European immigrants have moved into the low-paid casual jobs they used to do — such as serving behind bars, helping in offices and picking fruit.

Already burdened with overdrafts and student loans and facing the introduction of top-up fees, students are now struggling to find summer jobs to help fund their way through university.

Many affluent parents, who have reaped the benefits of cheap labour from eastern Europe, are for the first time experiencing the downside of mass migration.

Frank Field, the Labour MP and critic of the government’s immigration policy, said: “Some middle-class and upper-class parents, who until now have enjoyed cheap nannies and plumbers from eastern Europe, are seeing the negative impact of this new pool of labour.

“Their children, who had planned to work through the holiday in a bid to pay off some of their debts, are suddenly finding themselves in a difficult situation.”

The heightened competition for summer jobs comes after the arrival of an estimated 400,000 migrant workers from eastern Europe since 2004. Last week some of Britain’s biggest hotel and pub chains admitted that eastern Europeans were often preferable to students looking for summer holiday work.

Su Beacham-Cacioppo, head of employment at JD Wetherspoon, the pub chain, estimated that half the bar staff in London were from eastern Europe. She admitted they were filling jobs previously taken by students.

At InterContinental hotels, which includes Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, a third of its 8,500 employees in Britain come from eastern Europe.

Typically, pay rates for student-level jobs range from about £4.25 an hour — the minimum for 18-21 year-olds — up to about £7. East Europeans are more willing to work for amounts near the lower end of the scale.

Caroline Galloway, 21, spent seven weeks without work when she returned home to Amersham, Buckinghamshire, after finishing her history and politics degree at Cardiff University.

She first tried to find work at the hotel where she had been a waitress for the previous three summers. “Over the past few years I have seen more and more foreign workers in the hotel,” she said. “This time they didn’t have a job for me at all. All the jobs were filled by Polish people.”

Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova

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