Joyce Kaufman Hates Immigrants!

If it were up to Derek, he'd "grant the existing illegals asylum and allow them to stay in this country rather than sending them back — make them productive members of society."

Joyce wants them to go home. However humble or kind they may be, they became lawbreakers the instant they entered the country, she says. Do the citizens of the United States want to recruit lawbreakers? If employers stop hiring migrants who aren't authorized to work in the country, she says, they'd leave — "attrition through enforcement."

(After congressional efforts to overhaul immigration policy fell apart in June, the Department of Homeland Security announced a plan that would require employers to lay off workers whose identities don't match Social Security records, but a federal judge in California has blocked the rule, saying it could snare legitimate workers.)

Kaufman insists her position on immigration is based on a need for fairness, secure borders, the rule of law, assimilation, and pragmatism.

"Do I believe that the majority of people come here to work and make a better life for themselves? Absolutely," she says. "But there are millions — actually billions — of people in India and China and South Vietnam and Korea and all parts of the world who would like to do the same thing. At what point do we decide that we cannot accommodate every person who's looking for a better life?"

She agrees with her son's assessment about her off-the-air personality, though. She thinks of herself as a mild-mannered, giving person — the sort of restaurant patron who never sends food back to the kitchen, she says, and always leaves a fat tip.

Joyce Kaufman is standing barefoot outside her mother's apartment in Coconut Creek, taking quick drags off a cigarette. Her hair is piled messily on top of her head, secured with a large plastic clip. She looks as though she's dressed for a slumber party, in navy sweatpants and a gray T-shirt with the neck cut out. She barely slept the night before, she says, because her mother, Aida, was raging all night. "All night long and this morning, she told me that her mother was here and I was her sister and that Mom was mad at us — that kind of stuff. So she was in a totally different place."

Aida has Alzheimer's. Kaufman moved in four months ago to help care for the 84-year-old.

Inside the apartment, Aida is in good spirits, sitting in a black recliner. She looks tiny. Vulnerable. Kaufman tucks a baby-blue blanket across Aida's lap. On this particular morning, Aida recognizes her daughter, whom she stares at with wide, childlike eyes. "I'm very proud of her," Aida says, her voice practically a whisper. "That's my baby. She's the greatest." Then Aida blows her daughter a kiss.

Kaufman asks Aida if she remembers seeing her on CNN the night before.

Aida says it was interesting, but what was the topic?

Speaking Spanish, Kaufman prods: "Why don't they speak English?"

"They're going to throw tomatoes on you," Aida says. Then she reminds her daughter: "Don't forget I'm Spanish."

"I don't forget," Kaufman says. "If you're Spanish, what am I?"

"You're a Jew," Aida says. "Jew-Spanish. Jew-Rican."

They both laugh. Kaufman decides she's "just a little bit of Jew and a lot of Rican."

"You're baaaaad," Aida says.

Kaufman flips through channels on a TV set that's suspended from the ceiling in her mother's bedroom. She stops at a Spanish-language talk show on Telemundo, the station her mother wants to watch, and turns up the volume.

Then she walks into her own bedroom. Across from the bed, there's a shelf decorated like an altar. A ceramic cross is surrounded by votive candles and framed pictures of family members. There's her grandfather in his rabbinical robes, her father, a half-sister, an aunt, a brother ...