World renowned scientist Richard Dawkins says Brexit and Trump are terrible for science.

Author and militant atheist Richard Dawkins has penned a letter urging New Zealand to welcome foreign intellectuals.

In a post-Brexit, post-US election world, scientists and creative intellectuals would be desperate to escape the "redneck bigotry" of their home countries, Dawkins wrote in a letter published in the Scientific American.

Dawkins said science in both the UK and US would be hit "extremely hard" by the long-term effects of Brexit and a Trump presidency.

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

READ MORE:

* I'm a Muslim. I voted for Trump

* When Melania met Michelle

* White House body language

"Dear New Zealand, you are a deeply civilized small nation, with a low population in a pair of beautiful, spacious islands. You care about climate change, the future of the planet and other scientifically important issues," he wrote.

He urged Aotearoa to write to Nobel Prize winners, Fields medallists, Fellows of the Royal Society, the elite scientists in the National Academy of Sciences and more to offer them citizenship down under.

"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."

Dawkins wrote in the letter, published in the Scientific American, that bringing the world's top scientists probably seemed like an "unrealistic, surreal pipe dream".

"But on the day after US election day, in the year of Brexit, the distinction between the surreal and the awfulness of the real seems to merge in a bad trip from which a pipe dream is the only refuge."

Dawkins said the two largest nations in the English-speaking world had suffered "catastrophes" at the hands of voters, who he described as "uneducated and anti-intellectual".

In the case of Britain, science would suffer due to, "the xenophobically inspired severing of painstakingly built-up relationships with European partners".

And in the US, Dawkins said the US had just elected an "unqualified, narcissistic, misogynistic sick joke as president".

The disaster in both superpower states would not be short-lived, he said, because of America's "nonretirement rule of the Supreme Court" and "in Britain because Brexit is irreversible".