To play devil's advocate on this particular point, it could be argued that the place of your birth is by definition your home to which you're entitled a natural right.
To play devil's advocate on this particular point, it could be argued that the place of your birth is by definition your home to which you're entitled a natural right.
The underlying assumption of "natural rights" is, after all, that if some humans were somehow born and grew up in a context where no society -- and especially no modern Western society -- was inculcating them from birth with its code of ethics or enforcing it on them, those humans would somehow spontaneously derive the core values of the modern Western code of ethics from self-evident first principles and then automatically enforce that code on themselves without any external incentive to do so.
And that is pure fantasy, and is the point in these HN threads where I often start quoting Thomas Hobbes.
The U.S. Constitution was the culmination of centuries of thinking about political power and is remarkable for its distrust of absolute power. Unfortunately, that distrust has been slowly eroded over the last nearly two-and-a-half centuries, beginning with Marbury v. Madison and currently at such a state that presidents enter into war without an act of Congress, judges make law from the bench, and Congress dictates to the executive which cabinet positions must be filled.
It was a great experiment, but actually already a failed one in the sense of the original debate back in the 1770s and '80s.
Ah yes. Tell me again how all the people involved in drafting the Constitution came to universal perfect agreement in every aspect and detail of what the right way to set up a government was and how the resulting Constitution should be read and interpreted for 100% of situations, to such a high degree that during their lifetimes there were absolutely no controversies about how the Constitution worked.
Hint: the fact that Marbury happened shows what a complete clusterfuck of disagreement and disarray the Constitutional Convention was. Also, Marbury was good law.
And yes, there are older concepts of natural rights, but the one always espoused by people who advocate for the perfect-unanimous-agreement myth of the Constitution is the one used by, well, the people who drafted the Constitution, who'd been busy reading the theories of John Locke on the subject.
Hobbes was wrong on one count: Human life in a state of nature isn't nasty, brutish, short, or any of the other War Of All Against All nonsense he proposed unless there's been a serious disaster in the recent history, such as a plague or famine or invasion. In short, humans don't live like Mad Max or Walking Dead or Night Of The Living Dead unless their actual society was just destroyed and they haven't built a new one yet.
In a state of nature, humans live as hunter-gatherers, usually, which is not terribly bad most of the time. However, hunter-gatherer societies still have rules and ways to enforce those rules and hierarchies which are not fair by modern standards of fairness. Strict gender roles are usually enforced, for example.
My point is, humans naturally have a government of some kind, and definitely have rules which you can't opt out of if you expect to keep living with that group of humans. And it is entirely correct that humans raised in that society won't spontaneously recapitulate Locke and Jefferson. But they will have something, and they won't look kindly on people who expect to live outside of their rules and continue to interact with them.
And they certainly won't agree on which "rights" humans "naturally" have. Not even the right to live: A number of ancient societies practiced infanticide, for example.