You could might try applying to immigrate to Canada. They allow over 300k immigrants a year and the biggest requirements are to not be too old and fluent in English (or French). Lack of an official high school diploma is tricky but you might be able to a) pass some kind high school equivalency test in your country or b) write an internationally recoginzed test (eg SAT or GMAT) if you can score well on those then it s…
To add to this, another requirement is that you can prove you will be able to support yourself financially. With $2k/month USD of passive income (being equal to ~$2660 CAD as of this writing, or several hundred dollars more than full-time ON minimum wage) that might be considered 'enough,' and in the right location could absolutely be livable on without supplementary income.
You're absolutely bang-on with your second point though. Working with a lot of new Canadians in my line of work you can really tell who put in the effort of researching their destination country, and those who just wanted to get out of wherever they were. I actually have a really fun anecdote about this, I was training a guy who had recently moved here from Congo, early-40's and just an all-around great person. He was telling me how much research he did on various countries before he even considered moving, and found that not only would Canada be the best chance of a shot, but because he found our way of life more appealing than anywhere else. And he really meant it. I even asked why he didn't move to Quebec, as a native French-speaker, he told me he strongly considered it but wanted to learn English more than he wanted to immediately 'fit-in,' and even mentioned that with broken English he hasn't once had a problem fitting in or dealing with racism. He knew right from the beginning there would be a huge culture shock, but he mentioned that keeping an open mind and "standing back, to watch the flow of things, get a feel of how people handle the day-to-day" really helped orient himself in the first few weeks here. I still see him maybe once a week and we chat on the phone every here and there; he's helping me brush up on my French and always gives me little tidbits of what life was like "back in Congo," (he doesn't even call it home anymore, a direct quote; "Since I moved to Canada, I have been accepted with loving and open arms; this is my home now. I have no interest in going back.") while I help him out with the odd English word or phrase.