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Asked why he supports Clinton over Trump, Marc Andreessen responds: ‘Is that a serious question?’

The venture capitalist said any proposal to “choke off” immigration “makes me sick to my stomach."

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about why he feels Hillary Clinton trumps Donald Trump today at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco.

Asked why he supports the presumptive Democratic nominee over her likely Republican rival for the White House, Andreessen responded: "Is that a serious question?"

Andreessen said he evaluates candidates across four criteria: Their stances on science, free markets, trade and immigration.

"Neither party is very good on science right now, so that's actually interesting," Andreessen said. "I think the Democrats actually backslid on science in the last five or 10 years, with things like opposition to GMOs."

Andreessen spoke about Silicon Valley’s immigrant culture — noting that a language other than English is spoken in half of Silicon Valley households and half of companies have a first-generation immigrant founder or co-founder.

"The Valley wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be doing any of this if we didn't have the amazing flow of immigrants that we've had in the last 80 years," Andreessen said. "And the idea of choking that off just makes me sick to my stomach."

That appears to be a reference to Trump's immigration policy and the Republican's renewed calls to ban Muslim immigration in the wake of the Orlando terror attack. The shooter, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando Sunday morning, was born in New York to Afghan immigrants.

While noting that "neither party is great" across all the areas the tech community cares passionately about, Andreessen added, "I think clearly, one of the candidates is way better than the other, interestingly on all four, and so to me, it seems like it's a fairly obvious choice."


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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.