Biden secures tech backing

Two dozen award-winning computer scientists, in a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, said Friday that they were endorsing Joe Biden in November’s presidential election.

The scientists — including John Hennessy, executive chair of Google’s parent company, Alphabet — are all winners of the Turing Award, which is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

In a group interview, four of the scientists said the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration rules were a threat to computer research in the United States and could do long-term damage to the tech industry, which for decades has been one of the country’s economic engines.

The Turing winners are the latest members of the scientific community to find their political voice as the election nears. The research journal Scientific American also endorsed Biden this week, citing, among other criticisms, Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and his skepticism of climate change. It was the first time in its 175 years that the publication endorsed a presidential candidate.

The Turing winners’ endorsement — also a first for them — was made against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s increasingly antagonistic relationship with the tech industry. Several federal agencies are investigating the business practices of tech’s biggest companies, and the Justice Department could bring an antitrust case against Google as soon as this month.

The collective statement by 24 of the 35 living American Turing winners, including senior scientists at Google, Facebook and Microsoft, lends considerable gravitas to industry concerns about Trump’s immigration polices.

All 35 American Turing winners were invited to join the endorsement. Some did not respond because of poor health, and some declined to participate at least in part because they did not want to pull their employers into a politically charged situation, said David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Google and Facebook declined to comment. A Microsoft spokesman said this was “not an official company endorsement.”

The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.