SAN FRANCISCO — Through a Super Bowl ad, public statements and court filings, Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are taking a strong stand against President Donald Trump’s travel ban, saying high tech needs immigrants’ creativity and energy to stay competitive.

Although the companies are risking a backlash from customers who side with Trump, they say the pushback is necessary for an industry dependent on thousands of highly skilled foreign workers.

About 58 percent of the engineers and other high-skill employees in Silicon Valley were born outside the U.S., according to the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, trade group.

“Immigration and innovation go hand in hand,” said Carl Guardino, the group’s CEO. “This cuts so deeply into the bone and marrow of what fuels the innovation economy that very few CEOs feel the luxury of sitting on the sidelines. So people are going to stand up and speak up.”

The tech industry contends there aren’t enough Americans with the specialized skills these companies need. Though critics contend that companies favor immigrants because they can pay them less, tech companies argue that the ban would pressure them to move some operations abroad.

“A lot of these companies will really struggle if all of a sudden we turn off the spigot,” said Greg Morrisett, dean of computing and information sciences at Cornell University.

In a court filing Sunday against the ban, 97 companies, including such major tech players as Google, Apple, Microsoft, eBay, Netflix, Facebook and Twitter, also spoke of the entrepreneurial spirit of “people who choose to leave everything that is familiar and journey to an unknown land to make a new life.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella both came from India. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a Russian refugee who moved to the U.S. as a boy. The father of Apple’s late co-founder, Steve Jobs, immigrated from Syria.