Proud American here.
I don’t love that WEF study and I could spend a lot of time picking nits with its methodology, but for the sake of argument, let’s accept it as broadly true.
Why do Americans believe what we do? It is partial brainwashing by the media. But it is also a very real national story of immigration for economic activity.
The foreign born population of the United States is currently around 40-50 million the majority of whom are citizens or permanent residents. That’s a lot.
New York is a representative gateway city. The percent of the population of New York City which is foreign born was 36% in 1900. It was also 36% in 2000. These are people who came here for economic opportunity. Their lived experience is that the US afforded this opportunity. Now certainly the US isn’t the only country that offers such an opportunity, but we’ve been doing it for a while. We’ve had waves of immigration come from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Ireland and the U.K., East Asia, South Asia and Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
My grandmother came as an immigrant from Germany, off a farm with a grade school education and worked as a nanny on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I now live on the Upper West Side and my kids nanny from Guyana got her citizenship about five years ago. (And she literally lives on the same block in Queens my Scottish grandmother did when her family came over.) And there’s nothing special about my story. It’s fairly typical.
That report cited in the parent shows a statistic that it would take on average 5 generations to move from the lowest income group to the median. I have no reason to doubt it. But I believe that largely is a story of slavery, racism, Jim Crow and the economic backwardness (until they 1970’s) of the American south. It’s shameful. You can understand why we might not want to celebrate it, preferring to look at the voluntary immigrant story.