Vera Mukhina, THE sculptor behind the worker and kolkhoz woman sculpture, would’ve probably convinced people to keep it purely for artistic value. She allegedly did it with the “Freedom monument” in Latvia, but the Latvian “Freedom” statue is so ugly I wouldn’t have listened.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been, but the island the statue is on along with the pedestal itself is fairly small, so you wouldn’t have much space to work with for a museum. The nearby Ellis island already has a large museum dedicated to immigrant justice too, as that’s where immigrants actually transited into the United States, so another museum would be fairly redundant.