Over 370,000 available family-preference visas went unused from 2004 to 2008, according to State Department figures.

Approximately four million people are currently stuck in the visa entry backlog.

Over 2.7 million of these are on a waiting list for visas from the family-preference category. Family-preference visas are used to allow immediate family members of legal permanent residents and older children and non-immediate family members of U.S. citizens to come into the country.

Under current immigration policy, the State Department is only allowed to issue up to 7 percent of total visas available every year to applicants from a single country. If the number of applicants from one country make up less than 7 percent, unused visas cannot be issued to other countries, no matter how long the waiting list.

The Reuniting Families Act, introduced in Congress by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, on May 22, seeks to raise the amount of visas allotted to each country and to recapture and make available thousands of unused family-sponsored visas from past years. The bill, if passed, would also give immediate family members of legal residents the same standing as immediate family members of citizens, allowing them to immediately qualify for a visa.

The changes that this bill would introduce have sparked elation and concern for those on each side of the immigration reform argument.

“The ability to bring in relatives is a privilege afforded to citizens who have done things the right way, waited and ultimately made a formal commitment to become members of our society,” said Bob Dane, spokesperson for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that opposes the bill. “Providing instantaneous privileges to Legal Permanent Residents reduces the value of citizenship.”

Others see the bill as a positive step toward reforming U.S. immigration policy.

“Uniting families and saving them from separation is a true American value,” said Imad Hamad, Senior National Advisor for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “The importance of this bill is how it lifts the fear of family separation,” he continued. “For the last few years, families who have been here for 15 or 20 years have been uprooted because the parents didn’t keep their legal status up.”

He said immigrant families who have developed roots in the U.S. can be too easily deported under current law, and that the proposed measures would give them more access to the system.

“The law does not force children to be deported, but when you deport parents, how can children survive?” he said. “This child is now 16, 17 or 18 and living in a world they are unfamiliar with.”

The bill proposes adding any family-sponsored visas that went unused from 1992 to 2007 back into the pool of current visas for utilization.

If every unused family-sponsored visa in that period was made available, over 400,000 unused visas would become available. The bill would also raise per-country family-sponsored immigration limits from 7 percent to 10 percent of total admissions.

FAIR and other organizations that seek to limit and reduce the number of immigrants entering the U.S. have called this bill an “intergenerational relocation program.”

“The elements of this bill increase the number of visas issued and the number of relatives coming in,” Dane said. “An increase in immigration overall is detrimental to our labor market, wages, natural resources and environment in the best of times. With a bad economy and high unemployment, what sense does it makes to continue to flood the country with more people competing for jobs?”

He said the type of immigrants coming in is another factor.

“Since the 1960s, immigration policies have the principle of family over skilled workers,” he said. “That has changed the type of immigrants who are coming in. They are not coming for what they contribute to society but only because a relative brought them in. The average immigrant is unskilled and heavily dependent on government.

“FAIR has been saying that we really need a reduction in the number of legal immigrants… with an emphasis on skills immigration and ability to assimilate,” he said. “Limit it to spouse and dependant children and parents. Why are we giving a second cousin visa priority over a skilled person?”

The bill does not give family status to cousins of U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Some immigrants who come over are not skilled tradespeople, but advocates of the Reuniting Families Act have called this a generalization and said it should not affect the goal of this bill.

“They are labeling and pigeonholing immigrants based on one group,” said Ponsella Hardaway, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES) in Detroit. “Immigrants themselves are a diverse group. There are doctors and lawyers coming into the country and helping our economy.”

Hamad said the bill represents a first move toward overhauling a broken system.

“This is a step in the right direction towards comprehensive immigration reform in the country,” Hamad said.

“This bill is not as comprehensive as it should be,” he said. “This bill is for a particular challenge and problem. It is for keeping families and their children in one piece. It addresses this main issue, and this should be the focus of discussion.”

“What are these visas there for? They are for people to use,” said Hardaway, about the number of unused visas that would be recaptured.