FOR six years my French-born husband Baptiste has called Scotland home.

He has a good job working in the North Sea oil and gas industry, speaks English (laced with a Franco-Scots accent) fluently and is enormously proud of the life he has created here.

He pays taxes and contributes in every possible way towards making his home and our country the very best place it possibly can be.

He is one of the estimated 393,000 non-UK born citizens living in Scotland and one of the three million residing in the UK.

But for how much longer will Scotland be his home and what hoops will he, and I, have to jump through over the next few years to realise our dream of one day having a family here?

These questions have been at the forefront of our minds ever since last year’s EU referendum and have picked up pace since I proudly changed my name from Mairi Evans to Mairi Gougeon after our wedding in the summer.

He has no say or control over what his future or our family’s future relationship with Scotland will be.

There is a real cloud of uncertainty in our house at the moment. We don’t know when, or even if, Baptiste will be given the green light to confirm his permanent residency in Scotland.

The fact that we are married guarantees nothing. We could very well be in a scenario in a few years’ time where he can’t get permanent residency and has to leave for France.

Where does that leave us as a family? How can we even begin to plan to start our own family now?

There are also implications for our wider family, who may wish to come here at some stage and live closer to us. Will they be able to do that?

There are countless stories of the Home Office splitting up families, and my family is just one of potentially hundreds of thousands across Scotland who are worried about what our future is.

The scariest thing is that we would all have to apply for settled status, but that only works if the UK strikes a deal with the EU. What happens if there is no deal? Where does that leave us?

The answer, it seems, is in the hands of Prime Minister Theresa May as she continues to stumble her way through the Brexit shambles.

Since Article 50 was invoked, Baptiste and I have tried to cut our way through the red tape to confirm his rights to live here permanently.

We have gone from looking at him applying for permanent residency here to being told that was pointless because everyone would have to apply for settled status.

We were then told by the UK Brexit Minister David Davis two weeks ago that permanent residents would not have to make a full application for settled status. That made us consider making the application again, only to be told online that it would not be valid after Brexit.

If Theresa May and David Davis couldn’t settle this one for us, maybe Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, could help out?

Not a chance. She has merely added further confusion by telling us that every non-UK born citizen will have to apply for “settled status biometric residence permits”.

There is something about the word “biometric” that makes me think that process will be anything but simple. Given the way the Home Office have so poorly handled many immigration cases so far, I don’t hold out much hope that this will be any better.

Then came an alleged breakthrough as, according to a UK Government website, the Prime Minister “wrote directly to EU Citizens in the UK”. No she didn’t.

She posted an “open letter” on a subscription-only website and replicated it on her Facebook page, purporting to offer “reassurances” and “further helpful certainty” to three million others like Baptiste, who don’t know what their residency rights will be after March 29, 2019.

Sadly, any reassurances Theresa May gives to those people and their families are meaningless as she has no idea what deal – if any – that she’ll strike with the EU.

There are many foreign-born people living in our country right now who are in a worse position than Baptiste, and the impact of an impending EU exit is already felt.

People are losing their homes and their jobs. As a member of the Europe Committee at the Scottish Parliament, I have listened to evidence from legal experts, academics, Lord Kerr – who helped draft Article 50 – and directly from EU citizens who have had their life turned upside-down by Brexit.

One was told, directly, she would not be given a job because of the time and effort needed to train her, and the uncertainty around whether or not she would still be allowed to live here post-Brexit.

The more I read, hear and see, the more worrying the situation becomes. It has been reported that Brexit is leading to exploitation by unscrupulous employers across the country. Anecdotal evidence from Barbara Drozdowicz, chief executive officer of the East European Resource Centre, suggests some employers are scared to hire Eastern Europeans through fears they will be forced to leave the country.

Even more worryingly, she said: “The other side is that I believe there are employers who now want only eastern European workers, because they can treat them badly and threaten them with false information.”

Some landlords are refusing to offer tenancy to non-UK citizens, so people are not only being “exploited” or losing out on jobs because of their nationality but they are losing out on homes.

This week, we will have the Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell in front of our Europe Committee, fielding questions over Brexit.

We all saw how he was unable to name one post-Brexit power that will return to Scotland when quizzed by MPs at Westminster last week.

Will he succeed where Theresa May, David Davis and Amber Rudd have failed and confirm residency rights for the “three million” and their families?

Mairi Gougeon is the SNP MSP for Angus North and Mearns