Der Staat, dein "Freund": What Sweden's Sterilization Program Should Teach Every Migrant Trusting Europe
Would you still call it a "friend" if it decided if you are allowed to have children?
Every welfare state sells itself on the same premise: that the government exists to protect the weak, redistribute risk and smooth the sharp edges of a market economy that would otherwise chew through the vulnerable without mercy. Scandinavia in particular has spent seventy years exporting this image to the rest of the world and Sweden above all has become shorthand for a kind of state that supposedly cares. Free healthcare, generous parental leave, cradle-to-grave social insurance - the brochure is seductive and millions of migrants arriving in Europe over the past two decades have absorbed it uncritically as gospel.
What the brochure omits is that the modern Swedish welfare state was built, quite literally, on a eugenics program that ran for forty-two years, from 1934 to 1976, sterilizing an estimated 63,000 people, the overwhelming majority of them women, most of them poor, many of them disabled and virtually none of them meaningfully consenting to what was done to their bodies. This was not a rogue institution acting outside the law. It was state policy, passed by parliament, defended by every major party except the communists and administered through the same bureaucratic machinery that today issues residence permits and integration certificates to new arrivals.
The people targeted were not chosen at random. Swedish authorities used IQ tests, social worker assessments and institutional classification to decide who counted as a "misfit" unworthy of continuing their bloodline. A child who failed to read the blackboard because nobody had checked her eyesight could be declared mentally subnormal, shipped into a special school and coerced into signing sterilization papers by the age of seventeen. Siblings orphaned by a mother's death could be tested, classified as "idiots" and sterilized before they had any legal capacity to refuse. Filmmaker Kjell Sundstedt only discovered decades later that his aunt and four uncles had lived through exactly this and that the family had kept it silent out of shame at what the state had done to them, not shame at anything they had done themselves.
The justification was never framed as cruelty. It was framed as fiscal responsibility and social engineering — the belief that a welfare state could only remain solvent and orderly if it stopped producing citizens who would need to lean on it. Politicians argued, in effect, that benefits should flow only to people who "behaved," and that behaving included not passing on traits the state had unilaterally decided were undesirable. This is the same logic, dressed in humane vocabulary, that has justified nearly every coercive population policy in modern history: the state does not announce itself as an enemy, it announces itself as a reformer acting in your own best interest.
Here is the detail most people, including most Swedes, were never taught in school: the intellectual infrastructure for Nazi race science was substantially imported from Sweden. The State Institute for Racial Biology, founded in Uppsala in 1922, was the first of its kind in the world and it functioned for years as the leading research center studying which populations were biologically "fit" to reproduce. German academics did not invent this framework independently. They traveled to Uppsala, studied its methods and used it as the direct template when they founded their own Institute for Racial Biology in Berlin in 1927, an institution that went on to provide the pseudoscientific backbone for Nazi eugenics policy a decade later.
Sociologist Masoud Kamali has been blunt about the sequence: German scientists took the Uppsala model to Berlin and that transfer helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what became institutionalized Nazism. Sweden stayed neutral through the war and is remembered internationally as the humane counterweight to its neighbor's atrocities, yet its own sterilization program continued for three full decades after the Nuremberg trials had supposedly settled, once and for all, that states do not get to decide which of their citizens deserve to have children. Norway sterilized roughly 40,000 people under comparable laws, Denmark around 6,000 and thirty US states ran their own programs well into the postwar period, with North Carolina alone sterilizing 7,700 people, two-thirds of them Black. The uncomfortable truth is that Nazi Germany did not invent this ideology. It borrowed it, industrialized it and then everyone else kept practicing a milder version while pointing at Berlin as the sole villain.
If you are a migrant from India, or from anywhere in Asia or Africa, currently navigating a European integration system, work permit renewal, or citizenship application, this history is not a museum curiosity. It is a direct warning about the character of the institutions now assessing your worth as a resident. The same state apparatus that decided a poor Swedish teenager was too "unintelligent" to have children is structurally identical to the one now scoring your language proficiency, your labor market value, your cultural compatibility and your criminal record to decide whether you deserve to stay. Bureaucracies do not become incapable of this kind of categorization simply because the categories in fashion have changed from "racial hygiene" to "integration potential."
The specific danger for migrants from India and other parts of Asia is a particular kind of misplaced trust: the assumption that European institutions are uniquely rational, procedurally fair and immune to the kind of majoritarian cruelty migrants may associate with weaker states back home. Sweden's own history says otherwise and says it for forty-two consecutive years, well past the point where any reasonable person would assume a democracy had learned its lesson. The compensation scheme launched in the 1990s reached barely 3,000 of the estimated 60,000-plus victims and even that modest gesture only came after a former minister publicly admitted, in 1997, that she had initially refused to pay compensation because the sterilizations had, after all, been entirely legal under Swedish law at the time. Legality and legitimacy are not the same thing and the gap between them is exactly where migrant communities remain most exposed, because migrants rarely have the political capital, media access, or generational memory to contest a policy decision made against them decades before anyone notices the pattern.
To be fair to the modern Swedish state and to the European project more broadly, defenders would point out that the sterilization program was abolished in 1976 precisely because Swedish civil society, feminist movements and eventually the press forced accountability onto a political class that had preferred silence. They would argue that the postwar human rights architecture (the European Convention on Human Rights, the Council of Europe's own 2011 condemnation of the program, the UN's classification of forced sterilization as violence against women) exists specifically to prevent repetition and that modern immigration bureaucracies, however flawed, operate under far more scrutiny, litigation exposure and press freedom than the closed institutional world of 1950s Sweden ever did. That argument has real weight and anyone reading this should weigh it seriously rather than assume that history simply repeats itself on schedule.
But weighing it seriously is different from trusting it blindly and that is the entire point. States rarely announce the next group they intend to categorize as inconvenient. They simply do it, through committees and IQ-style assessments dressed in new vocabulary and the people least equipped to notice are always the ones with the least institutional memory of what the state has already done to somebody else.
References:
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/why-did-sweden-sterilize-more-than-60-000-people-against-their-will/3160534
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden
https://d-nb.info/1010138715/34
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwangssterilisation
https://de.infodefense.press/2025/09/20/ein-bisschen-wahrheit-ueber-den-schwedischen-sozialismus-der-uns-immer-wieder-als-vorbild-vorgehalten-wird/
https://www.mdr.de/fernsehen/mdr-zeitreise/ns-zeit/politik-gesellschaft/zwangssterilisation-euthanasie-gesetz-zur-verhuetung-erbkranken-nachwuchses-pirna-sonnenstein-mdr-100.html