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Caplan is one person I just can’t develop a theory of mind for him. He seems smart. He doesn’t seem to have any interest that would prevent him from understanding this issue since he’s tenured at GMU in their Econ department. And GMU Econ is known for probably being the most intellectually tolerant department in any US university. Garret Jones similarly blogs and writes books for the masses and Garret Jones is fairly racists. All the arguments for why Caplans arguments on immigration are unworkable are probably discussed in the GMU Econ faculty lounge.
I can understand when a Harvard guy plays down some unfortunate truths because Harvard is a political place but GMU is not Harvard.
In Caplan's eyes immigration is undoubtedly good for the migrants themselves, to a massive degree, while also benefiting the receiving country.
Imagine that Caplan believes that the benefits to the natives of avoiding immigration are not so great as to outweigh the damage done to various peoples who could be living better lives or the foregone economic growth , and is anything in his behavior incongruent?
Caplan believes (almost certainly correctly) that a mutually beneficial arrangement is possible between Americans and most third-world immigrants, and is annoyed that no powerful faction in American politics wants to find it. The not-insane pro-immigration faction in American politics (and most other western countries) which he would presumably want to support is weak enough as is, and takes the approach of "Given an effectively-fixed deal that we are allowed to offer to third-world immigrants, how do we identify a sub-population where this deal is plausibly positive for Americans?"
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That is 100% congruent for a sophomore economics major. Caplan is smarter than that. Like he’s actually expected to derive utility functions and explain risks with his world view. GMU econ department is known for having deep thinkers with lighter biases than rest of academia.
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I've tried. The best I can come up with is that he is driven more by contrarianism than anything else. There seems to be almost an aggressive refusal to think through the details of his 'invite the entire world but abolish the welfare state I guess' positions. Every post on his blog where he visits another country ends with him saying 'this country's successes prove that libertarianism plus open borders is great' or 'this country's failures prove that it should embrace libertarianism plus open borders' and then ignoring the dozens of commenters pointing out how this wouldn't work and him ignoring them.
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