I like to qualify this statement: some educated people. And not no clue, but a bit naïve.
But this was a trafficking issue. And I think that most Europeans and Americans at this age would have realized this. No hard data on this, just personal experience.
Disclaimer: I am from Europe. Already visited the United States.
How can you know that you know what the US is like?
My (now) husband had done a 2-month roadtrip with his family in an RV across the northern US and Canada, and when he came to stay with me for 3 months in southern Maryland, he was shocked, and appalled, by too many things to count.
I know many Europeans who have been all over different parts of the US, and still don't know a lot of things, like how easy it is to fall through the cracks, how badly you can fall, and how hard it is to get seen by a doctor.
But no idea is a bit too much for me. And I don't like the nationalist approach. Yes, it is always shocking for me to realize that universal health care is not seen as a basic human right. But I can also understand this, based on the history of the United States.
I would go as far as to say, that it is very difficult for an American to see why Europe is acting so strange sometimes.
But to the point: commenting the Europeans have no idea, is discriminating.
To be more general, then: nobody really gets the reality of other countries until they've left theirs - but since America makes most of the world's blockbuster movies, everybody has an "America of the mind" that is an internally consistent model. I hasten to add that Americans have the same model - even though we live here and see reality all the time.
Europeans and the Japanese, for instance, think that society naturally agrees that education is a good thing. After all, educated people have created everything worthwhile in life, right? Doctors are educated, government administrators are educated, engineers are educated - stands to reason! Americans, on average, mistrust educated people, to such an extent that education can actually be a liability for anyone proposing public policy.
And yet this is not reflected in movies, where scientists or engineers may be goofy, but they're always respected. So the America of the mind is profoundly out of synch with real America, in ways that flummox anyone who tries to live here in the blithe assumption that America is a first-world nation.
That's just one example off the top of my head. This is in no way discriminating against Europeans - everybody thinks America is movie-America. It's just that it really, really isn't.
I'm basing this on Europeans who've lived here for an extended time (really mostly my wife) and have come to realize how truly jarring is the discord between movie-America and the reality of how we think.
As a famous movie put it once:
"There are no cats in America, and the streets are filled with che-eeese"