Immigration was the main argument because that is what people wanted to hear, and got the opportunists like Boris a shot at more power. In reality it is not going to happen.

1. When have politicians ever followed through with a promise they made?

2. Not even the Brexit bunch are stupid enough to intentionally cripple the economy, especially as immigration was an issue for a demographic of voter the Tories actually care nothing about.

What the UK could do is put more restrictions on migrants without a job and what in work benefits they can access.

Reforms to benefits for migrants were a part of the deal Cameron got from the EU earlier this year -- which is now void -- so Brexit really changes nothing there. Maybe the UK could be stricter with migrants out of work and still get the trade deals.

The British as non-EU can't get a better deal than the Swiss as a non EU Schengen area member.. I think the British will either lose more control of immigration from this vote or be pretty crippled by poor EU trade agreements leading to the US learning to deal direct with the mainland.

The immigration argument was never about skilled workers. London itself voted heavily in favour of remaining. Immigration was a stirred-up debate citing unskilled eastern european workers taking low paid jobs, heeding and feeding the insecurities of areas of the UK which are and have been economically depressed for decades.

I expect visas for skilled workers to quickly become very, very easy, and visas for unskilled workers impossible.

Making immigration an argument only about unskilled labour is incredibly short-sighted. You can't run an economy just with highly-skilled workers.

At the very least you can expect things like construction or plumbing to become a lot more expensive (not that I consider either unskilled labour but those are typically not included when talking about visa for skilled workers).

Then there's the foreign exchange risk created by this whole mess, which will make skilled work more expensive as well.

I've been doing business with UK companies occasionally and up until now I had no problem with billing them in GBP. Now I'll have to bill them in EUR because I'm not willing to take the foreign exchange risk. Since the pound is already massively devalued against the euro and likely will continue to be in the next few years British companies will have to pay a premium for products and services from outside the UK.

I fully agree.