After I plugged the raw numbers into guesstimate I started to look into the data a bit more and came out a bit more confused.

I was not sure how much the numbers were influenced by 2015, which had more refugees combined than all following years until now ('15: 1M, '16: 360k, '17: 170k, '18: 140k, '19: 125k) but also fewer deaths than the following years ('15: 3.7k total, following years: ~2–5k total, so way higher fraction). I also found little data on the fraction of refugees being saved by NGOs (data for 2015 and 2016 is 14 % and 20 % respectively).

So many of Sea-Watch's lives could've been saved during peak migration 2015 when empathy on the Mediterranean sea was still higher and the counterfactual impact is less clear. To check that I updated the Guesstimate to try to model a post-2015 year with refugee numbers and deaths more similar to 2016/17/18 and yielded similar numbers of saved refugees as Sea-Watch claims, so 2015 was likely not an extraordinary year for Sea-Watch (They also only operated in the second half of 2015 with just one ship).

It really hinges on the question of whether the removal of an NGO would result in the refugees they would've interacted with dying or being saved by other ships. I tried to bound this "counterfactual death rate" by calculating how high the total death rate would be without NGOs operating and how big Sea-Watch's share of total NGO-activity plausibly is. Again, see the model. Under these assumptions, cost-effectiveness for a 2016/18-like year would be around 5000€. Which is still very surprising IMHO! But data is spotty and I made the Guesstimate at 1 am, so I apologise for potential errors.

Incentives might be a problem, see here.

Interesting idea. Are you trying to evaluate how cost-effective they have been historically, or how cost-effective they might be in the future with additional funding? Presumably they latter will be lower, due to mean reversion. Additionally, the easiest to save people will probably already have been saved, leaving people who are more difficult to access.

I thought the two other comments about downsides were interesting (incentivising a larger number and more risky crossings, and negative reactions from people in Europe), but it seems that there is an easy solution - they could return the rescued people to Africa, instead of taking them to Europe. This would mean the incentives to attempt the journey were not increased, and European voters should also be happier.

This situation is such a tragedy and I appreciate that you looked at it with an EA eye. I found it surprising that the cost per saved life might be that low, thanks for sharing your calculation.

I find the political implications complicated here. In an 80,000Hours interview, talking about open borders, Peter Singer seemed to be very worried that a nations sense of controlling their border might strongly determine support for right-wing parties and politicians. I wonder if refugee boats in the mediterranean sea also contribute to this, and how this would be properly weighed in. If this indeed would be a significant problem, are there options that avoid this effect?

Peter Singer: Well, it’s not numbers, I agree it’s not [the numbers of immigrants that count]. But it is the sense of losing control of the borders. I think that’s the common thing [that leads to catastrophic events like Brexit and the vote of Trump]. And the Syrian refugee crisis has had an effect in Europe. It had no effect on the United States. It was minuscule numbers. And it wasn’t the focus. The focus there was people coming across the Mexican border, and that’s why Trump wants to build a wall, et cetera.

And it was the sense that we are losing control of our nation. And going back to a little earlier, Australia went through this as well with the boat people, the so called ‘asylum seekers’ coming across in small boats from Indonesia, which again helped to elect a conservative government in the 90s, the Howard government, rather than labor governments during that era, and maybe even contributed to the re-election of the Morrison government just recently which is also a very bad government on climate change.

So you’re right that it’s perceptions and the perceptions don’t depend on numbers, but they do depend on, do we have control of our borders, right? That’s the issue. And of course, if you really advocate open borders, you’re saying there should be no control of the borders, and that’s going to frighten people.