Cite as: 523 U. S. 420 (1998)
Breyer, J., dissenting
born abroad. U. S. Const., Amdt. 14, § 1 (stating that "[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens"). But that omission, though it may give Congress the power to decide whether or not to extend citizenship to children born outside the United States, see Rogers v. Bellei, supra, at 835, does not justify more lenient "equal protection" review of statutes that embody a congressional decision to do so.
Nothing in the language of the Citizenship Clause argues for less close scrutiny of those laws conferring citizenship at birth that Congress decides to enact. Nor have I found any support for a lesser standard in either the history of the Clause or its purpose. To the contrary, those who wrote the Citizenship Clause hoped thereby to assure that courts would not exclude newly freed slaves—born within the United States—from the protections the Fourteenth Amendment provided, including "equal protection of the laws." See, e. g., Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U. S., at 262; id., at 283-284 (Harlan, J., dissenting); H. Flack, Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment 83-97 (1908). They took special care, lest deprivation of citizenship undermine the Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws." Care is no less necessary when statutes, transferring citizenship between American parent and child, make the child a citizen "at birth." How then could the Fourteenth Amendment itself provide support for a diminished standard of review?
Nor have I found any such support in the history of the jus sanguinis statutes. That history shows a virtually unbroken tradition of transmitting American citizenship from parent to child "at birth," under statutes that imposed certain residence requirements. Supra, at 477; see also Bellei, supra, at 835. A single gap occurred when, for a brief period of time, the relevant statutes (perhaps inadvertently) failed to confer citizenship upon what must have been a small group of children born abroad between 1802 and 1855 whose citizen fathers were also born between 1802 and 1855. See
479
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