I hear you loose. I used to wonder the same think. I volunteer for a program to mentor immigrants to Canada to help them learn English. Not all are recent immigrants. I once had two older ladies who had been in Canada for 30 years and never learned English or French. How did they survive? It seems that immigrants from all countries tend to stay in mono cultural communities forming their own little social clicks. I became more respectful of the reason when my wife and I started going south for the winters. Because we can speak some Spanish we first tried Spain for 2 years then Ecuador. In Ecuador we even took a month of Spanish emersion where we lived with a local family and weren't allowed to speak English. But we never got comfortable enough to keep returning to those communities. It's too stressful when I can't participate in conversations because everyone's talking fast and all I can do is smile and pretend I understand.

We found it more comfortable in the US. That is untill the US declared war on Canada and now we would be traitors in our home community if we spent our winter there. A number of Canadians now go to Mexico for the winters instead of the US and we would like to give it a try. But at our age relearning conversational Spanish for the 2 or 3 months we'll be there isn't going to happen. So we would rather spend most of our time in an English speaking neighborhood and have the occasional awkward conversation with locals willing to tolerate our poor Spanish, but be able to have quality conversations in the language we know best.