The digest mails aren’t sent during the import, they are sent after the import.
During the import all emails are disabled, but as soon as the import is finished and Discourse is started, it sees a bunch of users that haven’t visited the forum for a certain amount of time and begins to send digest emails.
This is happening since @neil commited
which has been discussed in
A quick solution would be to not automatically enable emails after the import (still it would send the digest mails as soon as emails would be enabled). A better solution would be some sort of grace period after an import where no digest emails should be sent, but I guess that’s not possible at the moment.