This sounds like fear-mongering. Is there reason to believe that foreign researchers will have a hard time getting into the UK? This surely is not an issue for the US, which is not part of the EU.
Inevitably it also sometimes winds up with a wrong decision due to some technicality or administrative error, and I've heard nightmarish stories from friends who had to deal with that situation because of some issue at work. Some received advice about not using the official appeals process, because it's cheaper and faster to just start over. I've even heard of company reps having to go abroad themselves to resolve some visa problem with a foreign worker because there was no process to speak with anyone within our own government in our own country who could sort it out.
This is not to say that the general principles the system is supposed to operate under in theory are necessarily bad, or that no-one can successfully navigate the system in its current form; obviously hundreds of thousands of people do every year. But it's not working well in practice, and right now at least colleagues from other EU member states don't have to deal with it. So there is legitimate concern that if we lose the freedom of movement aspect of EU membership post-Brexit and the visa and immigration system isn't dramatically improved, that whole group of people will be greatly inconvenienced in practice.
The difficulties of getting non-EU nationals into the UK to work are already pretty much top of the complaints list of folk I know who run significant IT companies.
I don't know about the academic sector, but in general UK immigration law is already very harsh, and the exit from the EU was largely driven by a desire to limit immigration.
That's .5% increase in our population per year. Per year! The net migration to the UK has gone mental since 1996.
It's simply not sustainable. House prices are crazy, council services and the NHS are struggling as we cut funding due to austerity and you're complaining about how hard it is to get into the UK when we've actually been letting in massive amounts of people.
Unbelievable.
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/statistics-net-migration-sta...
The immigration process is not easy for Non-European nationals. It requires sheafs of paper documentation and significant fees.
(I should say: this should neither be taken as "I now believe everything you say" nor "and now I will find reasons, no matter how arbitrary, to dismiss everything you've presented".)
I agree that an increase in population requires an increase in funding to the NHS (or at least keeping the funding stable per capita) and more housing.
But I don't see why those things are impossible, given the political will to make them happen.