Richard Dawkins has urged New Zealand to offer citizenship to notable scientists following the Brexit vote and victory of Donald Trump in the US election.

Scientist Richard Dawkins has suggested that New Zealand offer citizenship to notable scientists in the UK and US after Brexit and Trump. Source: 1 NEWS/Wikimedia Commons (David Shankbone)

Writing in the Scientific American, the author and former Oxford professor lamented the victory of Trump, and said it will be a "disaster" for intellectuals.

"In neither case is the disaster going to be short-lived: in America because of the non-retirement rule of the Supreme Court; in Britain because Brexit is irreversible," he wrote.

"Science in both countries will be hit extremely hard: In the one case, by the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners; in the other case by the election of an unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president."

Dawkins suggested that New Zealand write to all Nobel Prize winners in both the UK and the USA, inviting them to come and live here.

"There are top scientists in America and Britain—talented, creative people, desperate to escape the redneck bigotry of their home countries.

"New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands.

"Offer them citizenship ... the contribution that creative intellectuals can make to the prosperity and cultural life of a nation is out of all proportion to their numbers.

"You could make New Zealand the Athens of the modern world."