It may seem absurd to group metropolitan voters—Puerto Ricans in Morningside Heights, Amazon executives in Laurelhurst, oil workers west of Houston’s 610 loop—together as a demographic. But whatever blend of cosmopolitanism, diversity, openness, upward mobility, and optimism makes up the metropolitan consciousness, it was in unique, historical alignment with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Audience members listen to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak during a campaign event. AP Photo/Paul Sancya

Democrats’ congregation in urban centers does not come in handy during presidential elections . Clinton’s surges around Boston’s Route 128 and in Montgomery County, Maryland, ran up the margins in states whose electoral college outcome is all but predetermined. * City dwellers don’t help win statewide elections either. To take one example, Democratic clustering in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh makes it virtually impossible for the party to control the Pennsylvania statehouse or win the majority of Pennsylvania’s seats in Congress. And that’s before you account for gerrymandering.

In the runup to Nov. 8, the same solution was offered to both electorally disadvantaged Democrats and economically disadvantaged Republicans: move. People on the left, including Alec MacGillis and my colleague Will Oremus , have argued that liberal Americans need to decluster from blue states to compete effectively in America’s farmer-favored political system. On the other side, Kevin Williamson of National Review argued in March that what Trump’s rural white supporters need most of all is a U-Haul, to move to places where they can find jobs.

Neither one seems likely to happen—Americans are less geographically mobilethan at any point since 1948. Young Americans are not going to sacrifice their dreams to accommodate the country’s byzantine electoral system, which was designed to grant the franchise exclusively to landowners. Rural whites, in turn, will be buoyed by their candidate’s victory, at least until they are disappointed by his inability to turn back the clock to 1950.

The paradox of Trump country is that its greatest hope for economic renaissance lies in in-migration, in towns filling back up with industrious Americans. But the people that are best positioned and most willing to do that aren’t young hipsters in Los Angeles or Stanford MBAs. They’re immigrants.

The fact that immigrants are good for society shouldn’t need to be reiterated in this nation of immigrants. But it’s true: Immigrants are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans. (In 2011, immigrants accounted for 28 percent of all new businesses in the United States.) They’re more likely to be self-employed. They’re more likely to work in crucial science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. They make indelible contributions to American culture, of course. And they have long helped fill up, prop up, and revitalize downtrodden areas of American cities. Now, they’re doing the same in the countryside.

“Any revitalization of local areas is going to involve attracting immigrants,” argues Emilio Parrado, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Latinos have flocked to places like Duplin County, North Carolina, and Lexington, Nebraska, to take jobs in meat-processing plants and other nonunion agricultural and industrial jobs. “These plants do revitalize the economy,” Parrado says. “Latinos go to these places, open stores. You go to these places and you see the Mexican restaurant, the Mexican grocery. But there’s racial tension.” U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Springfield, Illinois, United States, Nov. 9, 2015. Reuters/Jim Young

According to a study by the Center for Rural Strategies, a Kentucky nonprofit, nonmetropolitan counties with the highest percentages of immigrants have lower unemployment. (The cause and effect here is uncertain; migrants follow jobs, but they also create them.) The flip side to that story, as reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, is that counties that have “seen the most rapid demographic change” in the past decade and a half voted overwhelmingly—67 percent to 29 percent—for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. America’s small towns are in desperate need of new residents. Yet in those places where that infusion has arrived, white voters chose to line up behind a candidate whose xenophobia surpassed what most of us believed was possible in American politics.

If Donald Trump moves to restrict immigration and refugee resettlement, he will hurt the nation’s cities. Chicago’s population has stayed stable thanks to immigration from Mexico and to a lesser extent Central America and Asia. Philadelphia has grown for the first time in 50 years, thanks to immigrants. New York also owes its record population growth to foreign-born residents. But the places Trump will hurt the most are the ones that voted for him. Racial and ethnic minorities have accounted for 83 percent of rural growth from 2000 to 2010. Hispanics in particular were responsible for the majority of nonmetropolitan population growth between 1990 and 2010. According to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, nonmetropolitan counties in the Midwest have seen their white population drop 9 percent since 2008 while the number of Hispanics (not all of whom are immigrants, of course) has risen by 18 percent. The numbers are similar in the Northeast, with the white population down 13 percent and the Hispanic population up 17 percent.

Refugees, too, have helped revitalize post-industrial and agricultural areas of upstate New York. There are hundreds of thousands of homeless, country-less electricians, bakers, and farmers stuck in migrant camps in Jordan and Turkey. Why not, as a 2015 New York Times op-ed asked, let Syrians settle Detroit? “Refugees resettled from a single war zone have helped revitalize several American communities,” the authors wrote, “notably Hmong in previously neglected neighborhoods in Minneapolis, Bosnians in Utica, N.Y., and Somalis in Lewiston, Me.” Those possibilities have been foreclosed by Donald Trump’s election.

And what of the Democratic Party? Its presidential model isn’t broken. Clinton’s popular vote total will surpass that of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump. She lost the presidential election in three states by the combined margin of the crowd at a football game in Ann Arbor.

The fact that Democrats have a possible path to electoral victory four years from now shouldn’t obscure the structural limits of the party’s appeal. “The Democratic Party has to be focused on grassroots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted last week. Sanders is right that a metropolitan party cannot compete in a pastoral political system. But the ideology that most distinguishes the Democratic Party from Trump-brand Republicanism—support for immigrants and racial minorities—is one that would improve the fortunes of those who handed it such a rousing defeat. This is the central irony of the 2016 election: Trump country has elected a president who will harass, deport, and bar the very people desperate to live there, the people who would help rebuild its small towns and cities.