The Senate Judiciary Committee has taken the first vote in this year’s immigration battle, voting to officially bring before the panel the latest version of the bill worked out by the eight senators who have been negotiating for months.

The 14-4 vote saw four Republicans join with all 10 of the committee’s Democrats to bring the 867-page bill up for official action.

In one of their final acts before wrapping up the Colorado legislative session on Wednesday, lawmakers approved a bill allowing immigrants who are in the country illegally to obtain driver’s licenses, making the state one of only a handful to have passed such a measure.

The legislation, which received final approval on Tuesday, allows immigrants to get special licenses if they can prove they pay taxes and meet several other requirements.

A fresh attempt to curb immigration in the UK is the centre piece of the government's planned new laws, set out by the Queen at the State Opening of Parliament.

Access to the NHS will be tightened, landlords forced to check immigration status and illegal migrants prevented from obtaining driving licences.

But alcohol pricing and monitoring web use were not among the 15 bills.

David Cameron said the package would boost recovery, but Ed Miliband said the coalition had "run out of ideas".

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee this week takes up a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration system, which has bipartisan support but also faces some implacable Republican opposition.

The overhaul, an 844-page bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight, will take its first step toward passage or failure Thursday when the committee begins debating and amending the complex legislation.

The Homeland Security Department ordered border agents "effective immediately" to verify that every international student who arrives in the U.S. has a valid student visa, according to an internal memorandum obtained Friday by The Associated Press. The new procedure is the government's first security change directly related to the Boston bombings.

Around 100,000 people were chosen from several million Wednesday to get a head-start on a US Green Card, in what could be the last such annual lottery, slated to vanish under proposed reforms.

Created in 1995, the lottery system leads to the awarding of 50,000 permanent residency permits each year to people from countries that send relatively few emigrants to the United States.

Washington, DC Mayor Vincent C. Gray

Washington, DC Mayor Vincent C. Gray is set to introduce legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain D.C. driver’s licenses, following similar moves by Maryland and several other states.

The legislation, according to a Facebook posting Tuesday night by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Engagement, “would allow all eligible District residents the right to obtain a driver’s license or DC identification card, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.”

Beginning Wednesday May 1, entrants from the 2012 diversity visa (green card) lottery can check on-line at the U.S. State Department’s “Electronic Diversity Visa” Entrant Status Check (ESC) web site to see if they won.

Applicants need three pieces of information from their green card lottery application:

1) CONFIRMATION NUMBER,

2) FAMILY NAME (Last Name), and

3) BIRTH YEAR.

Entrant Status Check (ESC): http://www.dvlottery.state.gov/ESC

Congressional advocates of comprehensive U.S. immigration legislation were diverted into a sometimes testy debate on Monday over whether the measure should be delayed because of questions arising from the Boston Marathon bombing allegedly carried out by two immigrant brothers.

The path to immigration reform in Congress has suddenly become much more complicated now that House lawmakers say they won't accept the sweeping, comprehensive changes that the Senate wants.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said House lawmakers instead will take a piecemeal approach to reforming the nation's immigration laws, taking up individual bills that deal with border security and employment verification to the creation of a guest-worker program for Mexican farm laborers.