I've noticed that, when a question is too easy and the answer can be quickly looked up, people respond in one of two ways:
Migrate the question to ELL, since it's too easy for EL&U.
Close the question for not including prior research.
I'm wondering if there's a policy for when each of these actions is appropriate, since (to me) it seems that it is not always handled consistently.
To be honest, I vote to migrate questions to ELL out of courtesy. Knowing that those questions will not survive the... competitiveness, if you like, of EL&U, I am hoping that if they are transferred to ELL they are more likely to get help than if they are plainly closed on EL&U.
I have never thought of ELL as a trash can. Just as a more friendly and helpful environment for questions of users who struggle with less complicated language problems, as we have ALL done at some point of the learning process, whatever it is we have learned.
A question should be migrated to ELL only if it is appropriate for that site. If it isn't, then migration only clutters ELL and makes more work for its users who have to read through the question and then CV it.
ELL's standards can be found on its help pages. (Unfortunately, the situation isn't quite so simple; the criteria for ELL questions can be scattered in other places, as well, such as its Meta site. However, that's an issue for ELU, too. Perhaps one day we'll get a definitive list of what is and isn't appropriate for the site.)
For your #2, the CV reason that I believe you're referring to says:
Please include the research you’ve done, or consider if your question suits our English Language Learners site better.
The second half is admittedly a bit vague (after all, migration to ELL already exists as a separate CV reason), but the first part should certainly only apply if the question actually fails to demonstrate (enough) research. If "the answer can be quickly looked up", then such a question would seem to me to be a good candidate for this CV reason.
