[inglor_cz]

Not necessarily, some of my distant relatives went to the US to work in mines and/or be domestic servants (M/F), which wasn't exactly high prestige and yet they considered the US to be freer and more friendly towards random people than their country of origin (back then, Austria-Hungary).

You may underestimate the seriousness of the remaining vestiges of feudalism in pre-WWI Europe, including, say, rampant anti-Semitism in the Russian empire. It was probably better to be a schnorer in New York than a Jewish doctor in Odessa (with its tradition of deadly pogroms).