It’s unlikely that you’ve been pondering the damage that a surge of strategically located Democrat voters could do to an American presidential election a few cycles up the road. Or about what a legion of spies sprinkled all throughout our government, our military and tech and aerospace industries, and our leading research universities could do in a decade or so. But I guarantee this: The Communist Chinese have been thinking about it.

What’s more, they’ve been acting on it.

Lost amid our concern about all the rapists, murderers, and terrorists Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats invited into our country — among 10-15 million other illegals — during the Autopen presidency is the growth of a not-insignificant cohort of future Manchurian non-candidates.

I’m speaking of the birth-tourism babies of tens of thousands of Communist Chinese citizens — loyal commies who’ve been traveling to our country for years now for the sole purpose of birthing a child into U.S. citizenship. Oftentimes, these birth tourists don’t even pay a visit to the good ol’ US of A. Instead, they simply visit a more convenient U.S. territory — like, say, a tiny Pacific island that we captured from the Japanese in World War II and which became a U.S. commonwealth a few years later.

Indeed, as investigative journalist Peter Schweizer writes, “More than 70% of the newborns in Saipan are Chinese birth tourist parents who utilize the territory’s 45-day visa-free visitation rules and the ‘Covenant of the Northern Mariana Islands’ to guarantee that their children will have American citizenship.”

Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Should the Communist Chinese be able to get away with this? Hell no. But, as Schweizer adds, birth tourism is a real thing, they’ve been doing it for decades, and one estimate suggests that as many as 1.5 million Chinese nationals already have such status.

Sadly, pathetically, American authorities have been asleep at their posts. For example, as the New York Post reported back in 2020, “Federal immigration agents swarmed three dozen sites in Southern California in a crackdown on alleged operators of so-called ‘birth tourism’ businesses. … One such business that has been under scrutiny is the 28-room JR Motel, a former motel in Orange — about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles — that has been used as a lodging home or boarding house for women from China.”

These babies, often the babies of Chinese Communist elites, immediately return to China, where they grow up thoroughly indoctrinated in their home country’s anti-Western, anti-American values, ostensibly to await their 18th birthdays, when they can then vote in, say, a swing state like Arizona or Georgia or Wisconsin. (Remember: The rigged 2020 presidential election wasn’t decided by seven million votes, as Joe Biden’s handlers kept telling him to tell us. Instead, it was decided by a mere 43,000 votes spread across the aforementioned three swing states.)

What’s more, when these tourist babies turn 21, they can apply for resident status for both of their parents. All this is of a piece with the quiet coup of weaponized immigration — a patient, pernicious, under-the-radar operation that turns replacement theory into replacement fact.

Here, we should consider the stakes of the birthright citizenship case that’s currently before the Supreme Court. As my colleague Nate Jackson noted last week:

The framers of the 14th Amendment had no intention to pave the way for a woman to illegally cross our border and give birth to an automatic citizen. Such a policy is insane.

Yet the legal practice of the last 128 years has gradually devolved into exactly that scenario. Even Solicitor General John Sauer admitted in his brief that this “misreading took hold by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration.” Time doesn’t make all things right, but it won’t be easy to undo that long history of practice either.

The Roberts Court is, in fact, the Gutless Court — the court whose chief justice bravely turned his tail and fled every time a monumental decision like ObamaCare or birthright citizenship reared its ugly head. Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Roberts.

My hope against hope is that the high court was doing a bit of rope-a-dope last week during oral arguments. Every justice except The Great Clarence Thomas seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s argument against birthright citizenship — so much so that the mainstream media gave us the impression that an upholding of birthright citizenship is a foregone conclusion. But what if this was by design, to ensure that another leftist mole doesn’t leak the decision beforehand, as happened when they overturned Roe v. Wade?

The language that’s being debated is the following clause within the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

But the key word, argues The Federalist’s Hans Mahncke, is not “jurisdiction,” as it’s been consistently asserted. The key word is “reside,” and these babies don’t “reside” in the United States by any legally or historically sensible interpretation of that word. The babies of Chinese Communist birth tourists should not, under any reading of the 14th Amendment, be U.S. citizens.

If the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration in the current case, the justices should at least make it crystal clear that birth tourism doesn’t afford U.S. citizenship. The Constitution, after all, is not a suicide pact.