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Notes -
The US actually discouraged second language learning for a period out of patriotism/final assimilation of Ellis islanders.
I'm also very skeptical of immersion as an adult language-learning strategy. The results based experts on adult language learning use grammar-translation- places like the US military's language academy, or missionary training hubs, use... classes, with blackboards and verb conjugation exercises and vocab flashcards. They also do immersion on top of it, but they start with grammar-translation.
Immersion as the sole means of learning is not as efficient as jump-starting it with grammar and translation drills. But it is key to actually becoming fluent. And you can eventually become fluent with immersion alone. You will never become fluent with grammar and translation drills alone.
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I think you need to look harder if you're skeptical of immersion as an adult strategy. It is the current thing on language learning YouTube and has some pretty impressive results. That said, I think it's swung too far in the immersion direction: grammar and vocabulary drilling immensely accelerate the process. Pure immersion by itself isn't incredibly efficient.
You can, however, become fluent through immersion alone: see the millions or maybe even billions of Chinese and Europeans who learned English through watching TV. I don't think the same is true for grammar/translation: Latin instruction is probably the best example of this, where you have professors treating each sentence like it's grammatical puzzle to be solved rather than just reading the text like they would have been able to if they'd incorporated more immersion.
It seems worth noting that English is pretty hard on the uninflected end of world languages- for Spanish or Russian you have to memorize conjugation tables. I don't deny that immersion is a real thing that greatly accelerates previous lessons(which those chinamen and euros did have, even if they didn't make it all the way to fluency). I deny that it's sufficient for fluency in itself.
Well you would eventually learn the conjugations through immersion, it's just slow. I've experienced this through learning Italian where I eventually just figured out how to conjugate some basic verbs (esssere and avere for example). Of course in practice it would be dumb not to just learn them through grammar study: I've learned far more conjugations in a few weeks of Italian class at Hopkins than I learned through osmosis in the ~150 hours of immersion that I've done in the language.
My own personal approach is hybrid of the grammar study and immersion methods for this reason. Certain things are much more efficiently learned through deliberate study, like conjugations or prepositions, and honestly even vocabulary words. But to truly internalize them, immersion is key.
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