If you can point me to the bit where he said that he would cut off the entry routes for highly skilled migrants, I will be (a) grateful, and (b) surprised, because I don’t think he did say that.to force them to hire the British not the best, really make sense to you?
I agree with him that industry (and the public services) need to get their act together on education and training, and I think that needs to be under proper government guidance/partnership, not the “farm it out to ‘providers’ of questionable quality” model that has applied in recent years.
Wanting to see young people in this country given far better opportunities to obtain skills is hardly xenophobic - most of us have been moaning for some time now about the damage done by a seemingly inexorable drift to a low-skills economy.
This is a problem that long pre-dates Brexit, and actually it was in government hands (all three main parties at different times) to solve, but they didn’t, any more than they recognised and tackled the North-South (too simplistic a description) Divide, or the corrosive effects of huge income disparities.
IMO in narrowly choosing Brexit the country made a self-defeating choice, but one thing that choice has done is bring to the surface important issues that simply weren’t being given the attention they needed (and, despite a lot of verbiage about levelling up, still aren’t).