The House Oversight Committee launched a visa fraud probe into several companies that specialize in “birth tourism,” where they bring pregnant women — mostly from Russia and China — to the U.S. to get automatic citizenship for their newborn children.

Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) are focusing on four companies based in Florida, Texas, and California and ordering them to supply records about their marketing policies and “the number of clients serviced and amount of fees collected for childbirth packages,” the New York Post reported.

“Birth tourism should never be big business in the United States,” a statement from the House Oversight Committee reads.

“The benefits of U.S. citizenship are a unique privilege,” the congressmen said in a statement. “However, as foreign expectant mothers traveling for this purpose come predominantly from China and Russia, there are concerns that the birth tourism industry is giving rise to potential national security and election integrity threats posed by adversarial nations that challenge U.S. interests.”

They two note that it isn’t strictly illegal for a foreign traveler to give birth in the U.S., but added that “willfully misrepresenting one’s intentions to enter the country on a temporary visitor visa is a violation of current law and considered visa fraud.”

The committee is investigating the advertising and business practices of four companies: Have My Baby in Miami; Maternity Services of El Paso, Texas-based International Maternity Services; Doctores Para Ti, also in Texas; and Dr. Athiya Javid’s OB/GYN clinic in San Diego, California.

Doctores Para Ti, for instance, routinely posts social media ads that flatly state they are engaging in birth tourism and even used the hash tag #BirthTourism.

For its part, Have My Baby in Miami claims to serve more than 2,000 pregnant foreigners every year.

The four companies cited by the House committee are only a few of the more than 1,000 companies that import foreign women into the U.S. explicitly to allow their children to be born on U.S. soil for the sole purpose of gaining U.S. citizenship. This status allows the foreign mother to file for welfare and other entitlement programs and to take untold billions in welfare program funding out of the U.S. It is also a national security risk as it opens the possibility of having trained foreign operatives with U.S. citizenship re-entering the U.S.A. years after their child’s birth here.

These pregnant foreigners typically enter the U.S. on B-2 tourist visas. The B-2s are meant solely for short-term visitation for tourism and are not meant for any long-term status.

The State Department has previously ruled that coming to the U.S. just to give birth is an improper use of the B-2 visa, with a 2020 rule stating that “The Department considers birth tourism an inappropriate basis for the issuance of temporary visitor visas for the policy reasons discussed herein.”

President Trump also signed an Executive Order last year outlawing birth tourism, though a federal judge paused its implementation while a case on birthright citizenship is heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It should appall every American to know that there is a thriving birth tourism economy on our soil, perpetuated by foreign nationals who undermine our sovereignty and have no regard for our rule of law,” said Task Force Chairman Gill. “Our task force is demanding answers from the businesses who aid and abet this threat to our national security.”

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