And for that the language has to be one that people want to learn--maybe you admire the culture (or some aspect of it) or the people for some reason and want to be "like them", maybe you're going to be moving there for 5 years for your work. Most people don't much admire Central American culture. There's not a great deal of economic benefit that'll come from learning Spanish, not for most people.
But you also have to have opportunities to use it in a variety of settings and purposes. You don't learn "a language" by learning a grammar; that's learning a grammar. And you don't know a language if you can chat amiably about the weather, but can't handle a doctor's office or read and understand an electric bill, newspaper story about the Gazan conflict, or read a novel. In Houston I have opportunities to use Spanish, but only passively beyond discussing the weather and high food prices and why a kid's failing my class. For mastery you need to know the grammar and the vocabulary and norms of usage in a large variety of situations.
Otherwise it's precisely like the other poster whose grandmother (?) learned some classical language. Yippee, I can decline "puella puchra" and "puellus pulchrus" and the principle parts of amo and even conjugate it in all tenses and voices and moods. Bleah. Most Europeans are the same.
"Immigrants don't learn English" is still fairly true. I've known a lot of immigrants who were here for years and "knew English," but only enough for limited situations. They knew English for their jobs. They acquired enough English to understand school terms. They could handle basic shopping. Some I tutored wanted to learn words for visiting the doctor or dentist. After that ... Pretty much in most contexts they were monolingual. Their kids were a lot better, but still had a restricted code. (Meaning that they hadn't mastered less common grammatical constructions and had little lexical depth or breadth in most areas.) This isn't necessarily a question of "want" or "not want". This is mostly a question of appropriate exposure and opportunity combined with no perceived need for mastery in those areas. They've gotten by with minimal English or a restricted code (depending on their generation) and why expend much effort for much else? In some ways their first language is the same, even often non-standard.
This is background-related. I've known immigrants who were highly educated in their first language. When they moved to the US they had already mastered numerous styles and registers in their native language. They knew the difference between talking to a cashier and giving a public lecture, talking to an employee versus talking to your doctor. Different contexts, different styles and registers. And in the US they wanted to replicate their native-speaker ability in these styles and registers in English.
Same for their kids. I've had kids who were ESL students and really had trouble saying much more than colloquial English. Then there were some who'd been here only a couple of years and excelled. Those who excelled typically had doctors or engineers for parents (not always, to be sure). Those who stopped at colloquial English had parents who only knew colloquial Spanish, having dropped out of school in their home countries, often before high school.
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