I'm sure that there could be some adverse effects of immigrants living in your neighborhood, but I doubt the people who would find this a problem would be at all charmed by their actual immigration status: xenophobia is pretty much equal opportunity and will apply to brown people whether the have a green card or not. Even from your statement that "immigrants drive neighborhoods down" I can't parse what part of this is in reference to identifiable indexes like assessments of home values (which are also subjective no matter what entity is carrying them out) or just to some perceived impurity moving into the neighborhood. When you say things like this, ask yourself if you'd feel illegal immigrants from Australia, Germany, or the UK "drive neighborhoods down." In Britain, for instance, it is far more likely that there will be illegal immigrants from Australia, and that the average person from Pakistan in the UK is there legally--maybe even born there: the perception is that illegal immigration is a Brown menace when it is, in practice, largely White.
If it is really the fact of their illegality, then the country of origin shouldn't matter. I sympathize with whatever perceived injustice you feel (the preschool thing is definitely problematic--though it seems like the answer would be to expand the program so your kids could go rather than eliminating the participation of immigrants legal or otherwise), but I also can't help but think you're basically trying to rationalize a set of anxious racial biases. It's fine if you have these and I'm sure you have your reasons for feeling them: but don't try to make them objective indexes for social policy.
The constitutionality issue has to do with who has the authority to enforce the law. This is a form of vigilantism--vigilantism that is carried out by a local government, sure, but vigilantism nonetheless. True there may be a problem with illegal immigration but there are also many problems with legal immigration. In that sense, I would be very interested to know if either of you could explain the procedure (and cost in legal fees) of obtaining a legal immigration visa from Mexico or Central America. I ask because in an attempt to discuss how complicated it was, I tried to find said information, but it seems spread out over many webpages between the ICE, State Dept. and different US embassies. The closest I can come is this list of possible visas--though I'd note that the actual visa you'd need to get in from Mexico is not on this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_visas
And in most of the cases where you can get a work visa, you need to have your employer in the US help you file the visa--in other words, you'd already have to have the job here to even apply for the visa--and your visa status would depend on you staying with that employer. (note also that it is a $1500 fee just to get the visa and in most cases, to get even a STUDENT visa approved [muchless a work visa] you'd have to prove that you had a certain amount of money in the bank--usually about US$25K: any sense of the class of immigrants we're talking about here?)
http://mexico.usembassy.gov/eng/evisas_work.html
In this sense it's worth noting that many of the currently "illegal" immigrants came in with visas but then overstayed them when they expired or were unable to get them renewed. That's just one kind of visa: immigration is far more difficult (i.e. when you apply for a green card or naturalization). But many of the temporary workers are unlikely to want to immigrate forever--they just want to work here temporarily, contribute to our economy, and go home (or at least that was the way it was: On this I'd also note that, before the border was militarized and the policies of border crossing more stringent, there was far more possibility of an immigrant only coming here for two or three years tops, then returning home once they'd made a little money. Now it is far more likely that, once they get here, they are afraid to leave because they don't think they'll be able to come back if need be.) Our current policy is set up so that it is increasingly difficult to get a temporary work visa--and since we've already pushed the practice into informal (and illegal) channels, it's unlikely that we could dig it out without a very public concerted effort on par with the 1950s Bracero program. Even then we generally lack the personnel to do this in a timely manner: people want to get a job and get working as fast as possible. They don't want to wait for three years for the privilege of mowing lawns and washing dishes.
If you were coming to the country to live with your cousin and wash dishes for a few months at a restaurant where he already worked, what do you think is the likelihood that you'd go through these processes? What's the likelihood that the employer was so interested in getting a new dishwasher that he'd help you with that visa? That you'd have $1500 fee and $25K in the bank? What if you tried to get a visa and were rejected? What if you had no other way to make the kind of money you needed in you village in Mexico because NAFTA had decimated your local industries or because the "War on Drugs" had empowered a violent mafia to make your life miserable: would you let your family starve just to honor US law? Would you flinch if you had to find a fake set of papers in order to rent a house in Farmer's Branch? Maybe I'm wrong and it is far easier to get here legally, but if that's the case, it isn't very easy to find out how to do that. Maybe you have a better sense of this than me, but I have never gotten the sense from anyone who's had to deal with the INS or ICE that it is a straightforward process.
In any case, the economy is doing a far better job of keeping immigrants away than the Farmer's Branch city council. Last year there was a 22% decline in the number of people leaving Mexico and that number is likely to be even lower this year (though it could rise because of the pressure the US has put on the Mexican government to fight its drug war, an increasingly violent proposition.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803429.html
You can rest assured that if the tea partiers agenda of the complete abandonment of a true government supported jobs program is enacted, the collapse of the economy will send all those nasty immigrants packing: its sort of like shooting yourself in the foot, but at least you won't have to worry about renters in Farmer's Branch.
For the record, learning to speak Spanish would, indeed, be a good idea in general: more people speak Spanish in the word than English
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
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