False dichotomy. The republican congress did not like the bill for these reasons:
Supporters of the recent Senate immigration bill claimed it contained a new border expulsion authority that would have “shut down the border” once in effect.
americafirstpolicy.com
First, the new border emergency authority would have been activated only on a discretionary basis by the DHS secretary after an average of 4,000 illegal aliens per day were “encountered” at the southern border over a seven-day period. This is the equivalent of 120,000 illegal aliens crossing the border in a month or 1.46 million in a year. February 2021 is the only month during the Biden Administration in which southern border “encounters” of illegal aliens were fewer than 120,000.
The border emergency authority would have become mandatory if an average of 5,000 illegal aliens per day were “encountered” at the southern border over a seven-day period or if 8,500 illegal aliens were “encountered” in a single day. Considering that the current DHS secretary has refused to use existing discretionary authority, such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, there is little reason to believe this new authority would be used before the mandatory trigger applies. This is the equivalent of 150,000 illegal aliens per month or 1.8 million illegal aliens crossing the southern border per year before this new authority supposedly intended to “respond to extraordinary migration circumstances” would kick in. That is an unprecedented level of illegal immigration that our country never experienced before the Biden Administration.
Second, the total illegal immigration level implicitly authorized by the Senate before the border emergency authority applied would have been even higher. The 5,000 trigger excluded all non-Mexican unaccompanied alien children (UAC) “encountered” as well as known “gotaways”—illegal aliens who were observed evading Border Patrol while disappearing into American communities. Thus far, during the Biden Administration, there have been at least 1.8 million known gotaways and almost 371,000 non-Mexican UAC encounters. Assuming that those levels remain constant, and there is reason to believe they would both have increased under this bill, that’s a monthly average of 51,429 gotaways and 10,593 UACs allowed into the country on top of the 150,000 illegal aliens who would be processed into the U.S. before the new “expulsion” authority was triggered.
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