A lawyer and immigrant himself, John K. Bingham is a frequent speaker and panellist at international conferences on migration. Bingham addressed the UN General Assembly at the High Level Dialogue on Migration and Development in 2006, participated in the first Global Forum on Migration and Development in Brussels in 2007 and was one of two NGO experts invited to present a paper at the second Global Forum in Manila in 2008. He was recently elected president of the International NGO Platform on the Migrant Workers Convention.

Before joining ICMC in 2005, Bingham worked with Catholic Charities in New York for eight years, where he was director of the departments of Immigrant and Refugee Services and later Capital Projects and Law. He served as Chair of the Board of the New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy network with 180 member organizations, and on the migration advisory group of the US Catholic Conference of Bishops.

During the eight years prior, he taught human rights and criminal justice with COERR, the Catholic Office of Emergency Relief and Refugees, in a refugee camp of 240,000 Cambodians in Thailand, and later international business law at the university in Cambodia’s capital, where he co-authored two books, Free market contract law and an English-Cambodian law dictionary.

A graduate of Fordham Law School and St. John’s University in New York, Bingham worked for eight years in the legal department of a major Wall Street investment bank, where he was Vice President. He is married and has four sons.