PHOENIX -- "Cuanto?" asks a young man pointing to four bottles of car polish at a recent garage sale in an east Phoenix neighborhood.
The question, Spanish for "How much?" sends Minerva Ruiz and Claudia Suriano scrambling and calling out to their friend, Silvia Arias, who's selling the polish. "Silvia!"
Arias is out of earshot, so Suriano improvises.
"Cinco dolares," she says. "Five dollars." And another sale is made.
As the women await their next customer in the rising heat of an Arizona morning, they talk quietly about food and clothes, about their children and husbands. They are best friends, all mothers who are viewed as pillars of parental support at the neighborhood elementary school.
All three are illegal immigrants from Mexico.
They're holding the garage sale to raise money to leave Arizona, along with many others, and to escape the state's tough new law that cracks down on people just like them.
The law's stated intention is unambiguous: It seeks to drive illegal immigrants out of Arizona and to discourage them from coming here.
There is no official data tracking how many are leaving because of the new law. "It's something that's really tough to get a handle on numerically," said Bill Schooling, Arizona's state demographer. "It's not just the immigration bill. It's also employer sanctions and the economy. How do you separate out the motivating factors?"
But anecdotal evidence provided by schools and businesses in heavily Hispanic neighborhoods and by healthcare clinics suggest that sizable numbers are departing. Ignacio Rodriguez, associate director for the Phoenix Roman Catholic diocese's Office of Hispanic Ministries, said churches in the area are also seeing families leave.
Priests are "seeing some people approach them and ask for a blessing because they're leaving the state to go back to their country of origin or another state," he said. "Unless they approach and ask for a sending-off blessing, we wouldn't have any idea they're leaving or why."
Ruiz and Suriano and their families plan to move this month. Arias and her family are considering leaving, but are waiting to see if the law will go into effect as scheduled July 29, and, if so, how it will be enforced.
The law requires police investigating another incident or crime to ask people about their immigration status if there's a "reasonable suspicion" they're in the country illegally. It also makes being in Arizona illegally a misdemeanor, and it prohibits seeking day-labor work along the state's streets.
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