Per Politico: At the Milwaukee [Police Association] event, [JD Vance] cit[ed] the 2002 film [The Gangs of New York] about an Irish man who returns to New York to kill his father’s killer, the leader of a gang that believes America should belong to native-born Americans and opposes immigration.
“What happens when you have massive amounts of illegal immigration,” Vance said. “It actually starts to create ethnic conflict. It creates higher crime rates. We’ve certainly seen that over the last few years. And I would like to stop it.”
Note: The film Gangs of New York, directed by Martin Scorsese, is set in the early 1860s. Amsterdam Vallon returns to the Five Points area of New York City seeking revenge against Bill “The Butcher” Cutting, his father’s killer. The backdrop of the film includes the social and political tensions of the time, particularly the conflicts between native-born Americans and Irish immigrants, during the American Civil War.
The most plausible ethnic enclave today that Vance might compare with Irish in the 19th Century is the Hispanic community, in particular in major urban areas. Hispanics accounted for 19% of adult arrests for violent crimes in 2019, proportional to their share (18%) of the U.S. population. For specific violent crimes like homicide, Hispanics made up only 2.3% of offenders.