One of the right wing’s favorite anti-immigrant claims is that immigrants are dangerous and commit high levels of crime.

A new report by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, however, finds that these claims are baseless:

“In California, as in the rest of the nation, immigrants … have extremely low rates of criminal activity,” said Kristin Butcher, a co-author of the report, “Crime, Corrections and California: What Does Immigration Have to Do With It?”

Available data, the report’s authors said, “suggest that long-standing fears of immigration as a threat to public safety are unjustified.”

Starting with the fact that immigrants make up 35 percent of the state’s adult population but only 17 percent of its prisoners, researchers said they discovered several “striking” findings.