It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion.
More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.
The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:
When 22-year-old Mohammad left Libya’s coastline in a decrepit wooden boat headed for Italy in August, he had no illusions about where he would end up.
Unlike many smugglers in Libya who lure clients in with false promises of reaching Europe within hours, his agent was brutally frank. It would take about three hours to reach international waters, he explained. Once there the boat would drift until spotted by one of the humanitarian rescue vessels plying the central Mediterranean, at which point he and his fellow passengers would be taken aboard and transferred to Italy, where they could apply for asylum.
This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.
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More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.
The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:
Time: Don't Blame Rescue-at-Sea Organizations for Migrants Coming to Europe
This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.
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