Migration/immigration. Migration refers to any movement of humans (or animals) from one area to another. Immigration refers to such movements by humans when they involve crossing established state boundaries and are regulated by the governments of the territories they involve. So immigration really exists only under the modern state system.
First World/Third World. The term “third world” was coined in the 1950s as part of an anticolonial analysis that explained the poverty of many of the world’s regions as a legacy of their colonial past. It contrasted the situation of the former colonies to that of the “first world” industrialized powers, and the “second world,” or socialist bloc, countries.
Modernization theorists compared “underdeveloped” or “less developed” countries to “developed” countries, implying that “development” was a discrete process that all countries would go through at their own pace. Scholars from the dependency school responded that underdevelopment and development were two sides of the same coin: underdevelopment was not a starting state but rather a result of colonial exploitation. Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa critiques the term and the theory behind it.
Other economists offered “industrialized” and “nonindustrialized,” and later added “newly industrialized” or NICS (newly industrialized countries, referring usually to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). But the deindustrialization of the first world, and the very different nature of the industrialization now going on in the third, makes these terms problematic.
Despite the radical changes in the global economic and social order since the 1950s, the concepts of First World and Third World still offer considerable power for understanding the roots and nature of global inequality.
Latino/Hispanic. Although the terms are often used interchangeably today, they have very different histories. Most people of Latin American origin in the United States have historically identified themselves ethnically by the country they come from (i.e., as Mexican, Dominican, Colombian, etc.). During the 1960s, in the context of anticolonial revolutions abroad and African American and Native American organizing at home, a Chicano movement and a Puerto Rican or Boricua movement also emerged in the United States. These movements identified with the indigenous peoples of their homelands. “Chicano” referred to Mexican Americans’ ancestry among the Mexica indigenous people; “Boricua” referred to the Taíno name for the island of Puerto Rico. They used the concept of internal colonialism and analyzed their historical situation in the United States as that of colonized minorities, rather than immigrants.
It was in this context that the U.S. government began to utilize the term “Hispanic.” To some, especially in the Southwest, it was a term that tried to depoliticize their identity, and in particular to erase the indigenous and African origins of many Latin Americans. In the Mexican North (now the U.S. Southwest), “Hispanic” tended to be used by Spanish-origin elites to distinguish themselves from Mexicans of African and indigenous origin, and many Chicano activists found the term offensive. On the East Coast, where Puerto Rican migrants saw their country’s resistance to Anglicization as an important part of their identity and ethnic pride, the term “Hispanic” tended to be taken on more readily as an acknowledgment of the importance of the Spanish language to Puerto Ricans.
“Latino” came into common usage in the 1980s, as an alternative to “Hispanic.” More Latin Americans from different parts of the continent were entering the United States, and people of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin were becoming more and more geographically dispersed throughout the country. The term “Latino” grew out of the same political consciousness as “Chicano” and “Boricua,” but expanded it to all Latin Americans, acknowledging the common historical experience of colonization and oppression of people of Latin American origin in the United States.
By the year 2000, though, the term “Latino” had lost much of its radical edge. Mainstream newspapers began to adopt it, and the 2000 census offered “Hispanic or Latino” as a category.
Some scholars and activists point out a further awkwardness built into the term “Hispanic”: because it encompasses all things (or people) related to Spain or the Spanish language, it creates a category of people that includes those from a European country—Spain—and Spanish-speaking Latin America, but not people from Brazil or Haiti. It might be a logical category for studying literature (“Hispanic literature”), but it is not one that makes a lot of sense in looking at immigrants or ethnicity in the United States.