This should have happened years ago. For years it's been a race to the bottom of countries turning a blind eye to asylum seekers going through their territory, and making the process as harsh as possible, as they hope they pass through and claim somewhere else instead. Meanwhile the likes of Italy and Greece get swamped and have to deal with the cost alone, and the likes of Germany, Sweden and Austria ultimately end up with far more asylum seekers than anyone else. A central fund that pays for asylum seekers wherever they are gets rid of this incentive to not deal with them fairly.
Personally, I'd go one further and have a quota system, where they are processed in the frontline countries, but are then assigned to a country. Obviously asylum seekers should be able to specify a preference (and if they have family already in a country, that could be taken into account), but ultimately, if you're genuinely fleeing persecution, you shouldn't be allowed to be too fussy about ending up in Slovakia instead of Sweden. But yeah, the chances of getting countries that currently take fuck all to agree to that are pretty small.
