RALEIGH – Could al Qaeda’s next target be Charlotte, North Carolina?

Don’t snicker. As many North Carolinians have probably heard by now, a Pakistani immigrant was arrested last month after a police office saw him videotaping the Bank of America building and another uptown building that houses, among other things, the local offices of the FBI. The man was evasive and gave the officer conflicting explanations. Eventually, it was discovered that he had also took pictures of buildings and transit systems in Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, and New Orleans.

As disclosed Tuesday when the charges against him were unsealed, the suspect, Kamran Akhtar, turned out to be in the country illegally. Great – now we’ll have another round of chatter about the need for tighter borders and a more aggressive enforcement effort against illegal immigration. I’m not arguing against the policy, mind you. I am a strong advocate of immigration, as I believe everyone should have the opportunity to live in a free society. I also think that immigrants, on balance, add more than they subtract from our economy and our culture. But I think a free people still have a right to know who is coming into their country and why. Criminals, terrorists, and (generally speaking) those without employment prospects need not apply.

What I am worried about is that the Akhtar case will become just another talking-point in the immigration wars, and it deserves to be far more than that.

First, we need to take seriously the possibility that a place such as Charlotte might be an attractive place for Islamofascists to make their next attack on the United States. New York, Washington, and Los Angeles have been obvious targets for years. Although 9/11 demonstrated that Americans believe an attack anywhere is really an attack everywhere, my sense is that a strike somewhere else might serve to terrify middle America even more. There is a sense that terrorism happens in “big” places, in “official” places, not in just any city in any state in the nation. Thus outside of the Northeast Corridor, there is clearly less fear and probably a lower level of security (though an on-the-ball policeman in Charlotte showed that vigilance thankfully pervades our law-enforcement community).

Second, as my old friend Jeff Taylor pointed out on The Locker Room yesterday, it’s conceivable that foreign terrorists might see Charlotte-based Bank of America as the Bank of America and thus as a powerful symbol of American might deserving to be humbled. And they wouldn’t actually be that far off the mark. Charlotte is a significant banking center, not just in the U.S. but in the hemisphere. An attack there – or on another important city such as Houston or Atlanta – would indeed be perceived domestically and internationally as packing a rhetorical wallop.

Third, it’s critically important that we think through how best to respond to the risk of domestic terror. Can it be stopped only by heightened awareness and tighter security? For every clumsy videographer nabbed by the police (we don’t know yet that Akhtar is anything else), there could well be several more skillful terrorists surreptitiously plotting under our very noses. Part of the strategy for combating them must be to attack their sources of funding and support, including the states who harbor, sponsor, train, fund, or play footsie with them.

Now, where have I heard that before?

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.