Four Christmases have passed since Dorota Szewcyk last saw her young daughter. At least as many more could go by before the Polish immigrant’s 5-year-old may be allowed to join her in Queens.

“I cannot bear watching families together with their kids, especially for a holiday,” Ms. Szewcyk, 28, said yesterday, taking a break from cleaning houses. “It’s really hard when she’s already 5 years old and I am trying to explain to her why she can’t visit me and I can’t visit her.”

Ms. Szewcyk left her daughter with her mother and joined her husband, a legal permanent resident, in New York four years ago. She expected her daughter to follow soon, once Ms. Szewcyk received a green card. Instead, bureaucratic backlogs and quotas on family-sponsored petitions have kept them apart for four years.

Immigration law gives high priority to uniting families, with family sponsorship accounting for about two-thirds of legal permanent residents admitted to America. But while more than half a million immigrants gained entry last year, Ms. Szewcyk’s was among the hundreds of thousands of families trapped in legal restrictions and processing backlogs.

While the Republican Party has frequently stressed “family values,” it took a Democrat of New York to add an amendment to the most recent immigration bill passed in the House drawing attention to the painful divisions experienced by millions of legal immigrant families.

“Millions of close family members in New York City – and across the country – are finding themselves languishing in a wearisome visa application backlog process for years, waiting to be reunited with their loved ones,” Rep. Nydia Velasquez, who introduced the amendment earlier this month, said in a statement on December 19. “In a nation where we hear so much about family values being a priority, we must provide relief for these families struggling to be together.”

The delays are a result of federal laws limiting the numbers of family members immigrants can sponsor each year and an overwhelmed Department of Homeland Security, which is able to process only a fraction of the applications that pour in each year.

One of few legal avenues for immigrants to come to America, family sponsorship petitions can take years – in the worst cases more than two decades – to process, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, Deborah Meyers, said. “A family that was born in the U.S. and hasn’t had to deal with the immigration process would find it unfathomable to be separated from their spouse and minor children for over a decade,” she said.

On average, the wait to be considered is now nearly four years for spouses and unmarried children of legal permanent residents. Other delays are much longer. To sponsor a brother or sister, who fall at the bottom of a weighted preference system, a family member would need to have petitioned about 11 years ago for the case to be considered in January, according to the State Department’s current Visa Bulletin. The countries with the highest numbers of immigrants to America -China, Mexico, the Philippines, and India – have the longest waits because no more than 7% of family-sponsored admittances can come from one country.

The wait for Filipino siblings is so long that the cases who are now being processed – petitioned for in October 1983 – could have arrived illegally at that date and received amnesty three years later. Instead, they have been in queue for 22 years.

Legal immigrants and their family members often spend years apart while parents die, children marry, and other life-changing events occur. Once their turn arrives, there is another wait: The processing time for green cards in New York is now about three years.

An immigration lawyer in Queens, Jesus Pena, whose firm has about 100 cases now in the processing backlog, said he has seen cases where petitioners pass away, meaning the petition is lost and the children age out of their category, resulting in longer waits. There is a “disruption in family life, people cannot travel,” he said. “It’s a total mess.”

Often, new problems come when family members reunite after being separated for long periods.

“It’s causing a lot of hidden problems for families,” a public information officer for the Philippine Consulate in New York, Edgar Badajos, said. “There’s a generation gap already between those who are here and those who are left, and in some cases it leads to misunderstanding.”

Ms. Meyers, of the Migration Policy Institute, noted that even in employment-based petitions there are also significant backlogs. She said such restrictions on legal avenues for immigration could actually promote illegal immigration.

“Even though there’s legitimate concern over illegal immigration, the focus sometimes misses the mark on some of the other problems in the system,” Ms. Meyers said, referring to employment based and family-sponsored delays. “We just don’t hear that much debate about that in the policy arena, but I think that would be an important element of comprehensive immigration reform.”

In the House bill passed into law earlier this month that tries to restrict illegal immigration through stronger enforcement, Rep. Velasquez’s amendment, in broad terms, would change the processing backlog through transferring and increasing personnel to focus areas, streamlining paperwork, and promoting new technology. She said that while President Bush has already pledged to do this, with a $500 million initiative launched in 2002 to decrease to six months the wait for visa processing by September 2006, his efforts had fallen short, with about a million cases still waiting to be processed.

In truth, his efforts have met with some success – in particular in the New York office, where the wait is the longest in the nation. Scores of new officers were brought in this summer, contributing to a 25% increase in applications completed in the last fiscal year, according to the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services.

“Our customers are waiting too long, and we’re fixing it,” the director of the USCIS New York District, Mary Ann Gantner, said in a statement when the decrease was announced last month. “We have a ways to go, but we’re getting there. This time next year, people filing for citizenship or a green card in New York will get a decision in six months or less.”

This is doubtful, critics charge – and even an official at the Department of Homeland Security has agreed. Eliminating the processing backlog alone, moreover, will not solve the problem of immigrant families being separated, according to the deputy director of immigration policy and training at the New York Immigration Coalition, Julie Dinnerstein.

The group supports an immigration bill introduced by Senators McCain and Kennedy that would increase the number of visas allotted to family members of legal permanent residents, as well as taking steps to eliminate the processing problems.

Earlier this year Ms. Szewcyk joined the immigration debate in Washington, sharing her story with Congress members and lobbying to decrease the backlog. While the details of her case, which was complicated by a husband who turned abusive, are unique, the wait is not.

“I understand why the adults have to wait, but I don’t understand when my husband has a green card, I’m waiting, and she cannot just come here with a visa. She shouldn’t have to wait to have a green card,” Ms. Szewcyk said. “People want to be with their children.”