A bill that would allow Connecticut residents regardless of their immigration status to obtain a driver’s license passed the House 74 to 55 Thursday morning after an overnight debate.

The debate raged on from 10 p.m. Wednesday until 5:48 a.m. All Republicans who were present voted against the bill along with nine Democrats, including Rep. Edward Jutila, D-East Lyme, and Rep. Edward Moukawsher, D-Groton.Twenty-one House members were absent.

A Senate panel on Tuesday approved legislation to give millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, setting up a spirited debate next month in the full Senate over the biggest changes in immigration policy in a generation.

President Barack Obama, who has made enactment of an immigration bill one of his top priorities for this year, praised the Senate Judiciary Committee's action, saying the bill was consistent with the goals he has expressed.

Senate negotiators have reached a tentative deal with tech companies to ease restrictions on hiring foreigners for high-skilled jobs as part of a sweeping immigration bill, congressional and industry sources said on Tuesday.

Judiciary Committee members have been in negotiations with the companies and the AFL-CIO union over whether to lift constraints on H-1B visas allowing American companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers.

All foreigners departing from the nation's 10 busiest airports will have to have their fingerprints scanned within two years, according to a plan adopted by a Senate panel Monday.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has been debating a sweeping immigration bill to overhaul the nation's immigration laws for three weeks now, and properly securing the nation's borders has been a time-consuming, rigorous debate throughout.

Live-in caregiver Joesy Gerrish, from Fiji, with her employer Florence Tratar [Photo/ Monica Campbell]

Nannies, housecleaners, caregivers—they are sometimes called the world’s most invisible workforce. In the US alone, it’s estimated that more than 2 million people do this type of work. Most are women and many are immigrants. And pressure is growing to address their working conditions. As part of The World's Nation coverage, The World’s Monica Campbell has our first piece in a series about domestic workers. It looks at a home aide from Fiji, her elderly employer, and a short documentary called “The Caretaker” highlighting these intimate partnerships.

Prospects for passage of a major immigration bill improved on Thursday when a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives declared they had reached a tentative deal, resolving disputes that had threatened to torpedo negotiations.

The breakthrough came at the end of a two-hour private meeting of seven Republican and Democratic negotiators. The eighth negotiator in this so-called House Gang of Eight was unavailable after undergoing surgery on Wednesday.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved two significant amendments to landmark immigration legislation that would affect American colleges and the international students they enroll.

A Senate panel took up amendments to a comprehensive immigration bill Tuesday and was expected to consider a proposal aimed at tightening the monitoring of foreign students in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.

In case there remained any doubt that the debate over immigration reform would be long and arduous, senators on Tuesday filed no less than 300 amendments to the bipartisan immigration bill crafted by the Gang of Eight.

Some of those amendments have only a tangential relationship to the core issue of immigration reform. Others are so politically toxic they could doom the full bill — which, for some lawmakers, is the whole point.

A landmark bill backed by U.S. President Barack Obama to overhaul the nation's immigration system survived unscathed on Thursday during the first day of consideration by a divided Senate Judiciary Committee.

On bipartisan votes, the panel rejected conservatives' attempts to thwart implementation of a centerpiece of the bill - a pathway to U.S. citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

By day's end leading Democratic and Republican senators said the committee had improved the bill.