LONDON — Procedures and processes, as everyone who has spent time waiting for permission to travel in authoritarian regimes knows, are what malevolent bureaucracies take refuge in when they wish to deliver a silent snub. The bureaucrats tell you: We are still waiting for news of your request and have no news either way! There are procedures to be followed! You will just have to be patient! It is out of our hands!

As a journalist who has reported on Syria and Iraq for the past five years, I am used to it. It goes with the territory. But because of my travels in Syria, under rules instituted in 2016 I am no longer able to claim the usual visa waiver that Irish citizens like me typically enjoy and now have to present myself for an interview at the American Embassy in London when I want to enter the United States.

The first sign that something was amiss came in April last year, when I was invited to attend an investigative reporting symposium in Berkeley, Calif. The promised post-interview visa didn’t come through in time. It remained “in process,” and I couldn’t board my flight.

A few months later, I was offered a fellowship at Harvard. I submitted my visa application several months before my expected date of travel. Yet my J1 educational visa stayed stubbornly “in process.” Another journey to the United States remained out of reach.