ha, yes. Everything always works locally. 
The problem is getting stuff to work on a production server. We followed the directions exactly (Digital Ocean 1-click install - and everything else works). There is something wrong with the installation, that’s for sure. I see we are not the only ones experiencing the same issue ( see here: Import failed - I cannot import a migration archive, it fails!)
Unfortunately, updating the nginx config file doesn’t work as suggested there. Apparently, the import feature doesn’t work on production server based on the Digital Ocean install. What the problem is, I haven’t a clue.
I was hoping this would work, as I wanted to move from Wordpress. Hard to believe it’s so difficult. Spent a day on this, can’t get it work. Can’t imagine we will manually redo 4,000 posts in ghost. They got to figure out a better way to move from Wordpress to Ghost. The current process simply doesn’t work.