We know we can always count on Reuters to provide profoundly left-handed spin on topics hand-picked to influence public opinion. American Thinker readers will recall the extensive photo fraud practiced by Reuters camera men and photo editors in the Qana and Beirut stories in 2006.

Now Reuters has turned its jaded or perhaps merely incompetent eye on America's border with Mexico, in what appears to be an effort to cast Arizona's new immigration law in a bad light. In an article titled "Arizona border businesses lose key clients" Tim Gaynor suggests that Arizona shopkeepers near the Mexican border are suffering from the concerted efforts of boycotters shunning a local musical instrument shop:

... in mid-May the music stopped in the store. Mexican customers who account for almost all its sales stayed away as part of a two-day boycott to repudiate Arizona's tough new immigration law.

"The street and my shop were empty," said Lopez, of the "Day Without a Mexican" protest on May 14 and 15."

The new law

...has triggered legal challenges, convention cancellations, and, most recently, snubs by some of the 65,000 Mexicans who cross into the desert state each day to work, visit family and shop, spending $7.4 million, according to a recent University of Arizona study.

That Mexicans are staying away from the border shops in Nogales seems beyond question. Wasn't this the point of Arizona's new immigration law - to restrict the flow of people into the United States from Mexico? Perhaps Mr. Gaynor has superior powers of clairvoyance and can read the minds of those in the 40 to 60 per cent who shied away from Nogales shops in mid-May. Maybe they were actively boycotting the retailers. It seems more likely that those non-U.S. citizens who had no urgent, legal business to transact in Arizona were unwilling to risk having their lack of documentation exposed and chose to avoid the heightened possibility of detention.

A search through Mr. Gaynor's archives demonstrates a predilection for the predictable leftward lean, including a rather bizarre article suggesting that retired Arizona police officers (and many others) are heading off to Mexico for their health care, apparently an attempt to hit the Obama amnesty/health care/multiculturalism trifecta. This article turned up in, of all places, The Muslim Observer. 

Sounds to me like the Arizona law is already beginning to work. Mr. Lopez, Mr. Bracker and the rest of the Nogales Downtown Merchants Association, however, might want to take a look at their business model. Those who operate businesses that depend on a steady flow of bodies from Mexico to stay afloat might just have to head for the life-rafts.

Ralph Atler blogs at Right on Target www.rightot.blogspot.com