owe their time and resources to their American compatriots. Thus, there may be some validity to
the concerns that Pickus and others raise. Yet we know little about how these processes play out
Is mere self-identification with a panethnic or national origin
identity enough to reduce a sense of obligation to the United States? Or does a person need to
feel like American society is a threat to that identity before it becomes consequential? How much
do we really need to be concerned about people who don’t identify primarily as American? More
specifically, under what conditions do we need to worry?
In sum, existing scholarship on how identity choices, ethnicity, and discrimination shape
trust and obligation, though small in volume, is united in finding that perceptions of threat or
mistreatment are powerful. Both group-level and individual-level discrimination have been
shown to matter, though individual-level discrimination is generally more influential. Yet studies
of group mobilization have shown us that self-identification, the concept animating immigration
critics, is often innocuous and can even neutralize the negative effects of discrimination. Studies
of social identity, on the other hand, find self-identification to be more consequential and that the
interaction between identity and discrimination might exacerbate alienation rather than mitigate
it. The goal of the present study is to provide more clarity to this collection of findings. The
studies described thus far each rely on different, often regional or group-specific, datasets; they
measure both independent and dependent variables differently, rendering comparisons across
studies difficult; and they are inconsistent in the extent to which they account for individual-level
discrimination or group-level discrimination. Moreover, they rarely interact identification with
discrimination even though modeling such interaction is essential for determining the conditions
under which identification matters and the conditions under which it does not. Finally, they lack
the means to distinguish between types of non-American identifications, generally contrasting an
5
Sidanius et al. (1997) found that an ethnic identity reduced levels of patriotism for blacks but not for Latinos.
8
Convention