I don't understand what you are trying to do.

If you know your data  is going to be long  or integer, then I guess you should
declare it as long (since if you declare it as integer and it is outside range
-32,768 to 32,767 then you will get an error message).

Now, if you want to pass this data as a parameter to a function then, pass it
as it is
You stated that your function accepts data of type  long...

long requires 4 bytes of memory and variant 16 bytes....