Twenty-Four winners of the Turing award are endorsing Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election. They’re concerned the Trump administration’s immigration policies could be detrimental to computer research and the technology industry over the long term.

David Patterson, a Google distinguished engineer and former professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the most brilliant people in the world want to come here and be grad students.’now they are being discouraged from coming here, and many are going elsewhere,’ he said.

Vint Cerf, who co-designed TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet, among the names on the endorsement.

‘it is unprecedented for winners of the ACM Turing award to endorse a political candidate, but these are unprecedented times,’ Hellman tweeted. The endorsers are acting as private citizens and not representing any one company or organization, and include 24 of the 35 living Turing award recipients.

We celebrate open source projects, the lifeblood of our field, as exemplars of international collaboration. Computer science is at its best when its learnings and discoveries are shared freely in the spirit of progress.

We all endorse Joe Biden for president and Kamala Harris for vice president. As American computer scientists and as US citizens, we also endorse Biden.

The Turing award is often called the’Nobel prize of computing’. It’s named for legendary British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.