Minnesota family finally reunited after immigration service dawdled for almost 17 months

My grandson is finally home. An immigration process that should have taken about 15 minutes took almost 17 months. But Noa and his mother are back in Minneapolis. The family is reunited.

The saga began in early 2013, when my son decided to return to the U.S. after teaching in Japan. His wife, who is French, went to the American embassy in Tokyo for what they thought would be a routine appointment to get travel papers approved. They had been married for six years; they had lived and worked (and paid taxes) in Minneapolis and Seattle before going to Japan; they had followed all the rules; she had a green card and an extended travel visa; they had booked a flight home.

But an employee at the embassy decided to "deny" her. He said she had been out of the U.S. for too long. He suggested she should have abandoned her husband and taken a nursing infant back to the states earlier — with no job and no place to stay. It was an arbitrary decision that cost the young family their savings … and a year and a half of agonized separation.

Over the past year and a half they have slogged through the swamp that is the U.S. Customs & Immigration service. The rules are complex, confusing and often contradictory. The website is nearly impossible to navigate. Immigration officials — when they communicate at all — often give conflicting advice. Even lawyers who specialize in this area are sometimes befuddled.

The best course of action seemed to be for my daughter-in-law to surrender her green card and apply for another. She was told it would take between 6 weeks to 3 months. My son returned to Minneapolis and took a job teaching high school math while Noa and his mother went to live with her parents in France. They hoped to be back together for Noa's second birthday last September.

But Noa turned two as an involuntary expatriate, kept in limbo by an agency that is astonishingly inept.

The red tape stretched out and re-tangled for months. Forms had to be refiled, corrected, refiled again. A police report from Japan was demanded just to reassure someone that Noa and his mother weren't criminals. Medical tests had to be completed and reports submitted. Requests for information from immigration officials went unanswered for weeks, sometimes months. Tracking the application online became an exercise in futility.

The wait went on. My son managed a couple of short visits to France to see his family. He sent an iPhone video every day so Noa could see it when he woke up. They Skyped on weekends. At one break-your-heart moment Noa said "Papa, you should be here."

For months, nothing happened. Then in late July things finally started to move. My son was notified that all the paperwork had been approved and that the application would be sent to the American embassy in Paris. They would schedule an appointment for my daughter-in-law in about a month. Two days later we got notification that the appointment had been scheduled.

Noa and his mother went to Paris for the appointment over the Labor Day weekend. They traveled early so she could have more medical exams and submit more paperwork. The interview went well … until an embassy employee told her she was applying for the wrong kind of visa. This time another embassy employee corrected the error — it was the right visa and everything was in order. The final step was to get (another) set of fingerprints. The fingerprint machine was broken. They had to stay over another day.

My daughter-in-law received her visa and paperwork two weeks ago. My son booked tickets for her and Noa the next day. They arrived on a Saturday night and are settling into their new apartment in Minneapolis.

I would like to say this is a feel-good story about a family getting back together after a long, hard struggle, which it is. But it's more than that. It's also a story about a U.S. government agency that imposed exasperating hardship on an American family through sheer incompetence. This should have been a routine transaction — neither Noa nor his mother is a threat to the country.

If we were the only ones involved this would be of little interest. But there are as many as 20 million U.S. citizens married to noncitizens, and every one of them can tell stories like ours. While the politicians debate (or fail even to debate) things like pathways to citizenship, fences in the desert and armies of border guards, the basic failure of the immigration system to handle day-to-day duties goes unaddressed and largely ignored. For a "nation of immigrants" this is an ongoing shame.

My son and his wife have demonstrated patience, perseverance, commitment and courage throughout this ordeal — more than I could have mustered at their age. Noa will turn three later this week. We will celebrate. Together.