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I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.
Note that no one, most republicans included, seems to actually want a secure border.
The (admittedly moderate) Republicans I know generally would agree with this: the sentiment is generally in favor of enforcing the laws on the books, with the caveat that changing the laws to reflect reality is acceptable -- for example, by massively expanding work visas to provide a legal basis for those who currently cross as illegal immigrants to find work, which would require facing the thorny issues of what conditions would be applied for those visas. But there's a concern that the generally uncontrolled state of the border allows all sorts to cross: not just cartels, and not even just Central/South Americans. Take a look at the 2020 statistics (last page): there are literally hundreds of citizens of places as far away as China, Ghana, and Bangladesh, and Romania apprehended by Border Patrol crossing the Southern border (many of these may present valid asylum claims under existing law, but that's not clear from the data and is honestly a pretty poor route to encourage even if true). Most developed nations aren't opposed to or incapable of tracking names and dates of those that enter the country.
I'm a moderate Democrat and this has been my preferred position for a long time, but no one on either side seems to want to get there. Trump said he wanted his wall to have a great big door, but only tried to restrict legal immigration further. Democrats would generally prefer to ignore the issue. If work visas were easy to get for anyone without a criminal record and proof of employment then you'd have employment agencies working internationally to hook employers up with willing migrants. And there would be no cap on visas beyond the number of employers willing to sponsor them. A friend of mine who owns a whitewater outfitter and a number of associated tourist businesses in the mountains of Western PA has had reasonably good luck in the past with seasonal employees he's gotten under existing systems, and so, as far as I can tell has a nearby luxury resort. The one problem that arises is that some countries are better than others. He's tried to get Russians in the past but they all seem to disappear as soon as they get to New York. Jamaicans, on the other hand, are great. I first noticed this when I lived in the mountains and saw an unusual number of black guys with accents drinking at a local bar that mostly caters to rednecks. They obviously weren't tourists, and I started a conversation with them (there were few enough people there that everyone was involved in the same conversation, more or less), and they said they were from Jamaica and worked at the resort in the summer and went to Vermont to work at the ski resorts in the winter. The one complicating factor is that resorts in the middle of nowhere almost always provide housing, so that issue is taken care of more easily than if the employer is just a guy looking for someone to work in his restaurant and is used to hiring locals.
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