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Reinhard Neuhauser, third from left in the front row, escorted Fairbanks skiers from Moose Mountain to a training camp in Austria last summer.

Alaskans who know Reinhard Neuhauser, an outstanding young graduate of the University of Alaska, are outraged because federal functionaries in Seattle treated him like a criminal and forced him to return to Austria last week.

Former Fairbanks middle school teacher Donna Knutson said this leads her to wonder: “What kind of a country are we becoming?”

After hearing about what happened to Neuhauser as he tried to make his way back to Fairbanks last week, I have the same question.

It appears that the 26-year-old economist was punished because he followed instructions of the U.S. consulate in Vienna and refused to lie.

Our congressional delegation should demand an independent investigation of why Neuhauser, who has lived in Alaska for six years, was booted out of the country.

I will relate Neuhauser’s side of this horror story. It’s not for lack of trying that the government response is missing.

I called the State Department in Washington, D.C., Thursday and was told that individual cases were confidential, so there was no way of finding out what Neuhauser was told.

I called the public affairs officers in Seattle and San Francisco of the three new agencies that replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2003. They were polite, but they didn’t know what was going on.

Neuhauser said he was told by the U.S. consulate in Austria on Jan. 15 that he could return to the U.S. on a tourist visa and apply for a work visa once he was back in Alaska. He said he told this to the Seattle immigration officers, who claimed he was coming to the U.S. under false pretenses.

So just how big of a threat is Neuhauser to our national security?

Numerous Alaska families sent their kids to Austria with him last summer for an alpine skiing camp that he ran in the mountains.

For the past couple of years, while taking classes for his master’s degree in economics, Neuhauser was a volunteer coach for the Moose Mountain Alpine Ski Team. He and his brother were elite college skiers at UAA.

Knutson said her family had the Austrian as a guest two winters ago.

“He became like one of our sons. He studied hard, cooked Austrian food for us. He was gone all day most weekends working with the kids at Moose Mountain,” she said.

Jim Dodson, president of the Fairbanks Economic Development Corp. (FEDC), said Neuhauser is bright and honest and helped FEDC while he attended graduate school.

When his visa expired, Dodson agreed to help him with the paperwork and hire him to work full time as a FEDC economist.

If this guy doesn’t sound like Osama bin Laden, that’s because he’s not.

On Monday, he wrote to his friends in Alaska about his ordeal.

On Jan. 14 the U.S. Consulate in Vienna approved his B1/B2 tourist visa to return to the U.S. “I was told to enjoy my travel to the USA,” he said.

He told the consulate officials that he was going to make his work visa application while in Alaska and would not work for FEDC until it was approved. The consulate said this plan was fine.

When he reached Seattle, however, an officer of the Customs and Border Protection office accused him of lying about his reasons for returning to the U.S. because he had a tourist visa, not a work visa.

“I sit there and think this cannot be for real,” Neuhauser said. He said he told the officer, “Why would I, after six years and entering the U.S. for 12 times, make false statements to risk everything I have built up during that time?”

He was interrogated off and on for four hours, facing the same questions over and over. He said they told him that if he withdrew his tourist visa application, they would put him on a plane back to Europe.

About midnight he was taken in a police car to a detention facility about 20 minutes from the airport and forced to strip in front of an officer and put on an inmate’s clothes.

He said he was taken to different cells, all with the lights on, about every half hour. The next morning he was handcuffed and taken back to the airport by 10 a.m. for a 6 p.m. flight to Austria. He was told he had to buy a new ticket, contrary to what he had been told the night before.

Preparing to get on the airplane, he said the immigration officer told him that if he had just lied and said he was just coming to the U.S. as a tourist, they would never have denied him entry into the U.S.

Neuhauser said the entire experience was humiliating and he’s not sure how to clear his name or if he’ll return to Alaska.

I’ll have more on this episode Saturday. It’s a poor reflection on our country.

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SING OUT: The Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival winter cabaret students studying with Jaunelle Celaire are to perform Saturday at the Westmark’s Northern Latitudes Room at 7:30 p.m.  Tickets are $10 at the door.

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CLOSE CALL: We need to thank the city public works crew of Dean Johnson, William Perry and Tim Child, who took a break from garbage pickup in the Aurora Subdivision Thursday to keep a child safe.

A woman on Bridgewater who had accidentally locked herself out of her garage—with a car running inside and an infant in the car—flagged down the garbage truck for help.

City police were called, but couldn’t get there immediately. City foreman Roy Moore gave the go-ahead to the crew to break into the garage and make sure the child was OK. Perry hit the door with his body, as gently as possible, and got inside to shut off the car.

The child was OK. The mom was relieved. And Moore went over to fix the garage door trim.

Dermot Cole can be reached at cole@newsminer.com or 459-7530.