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).

Are you sure that people from Europe who don't fall into that group also didn't see America as a symbol of freedom relative to what they knew at home? It's possible, but it also seems possible, even likely, that the opposite would be true, given the degree of entrenched social stratification in post-medieval Europe.